Inspector Morse 12 Death is Now My Neighbour

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards

(Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard's Almanack)

IN OXFORD THAT same early evening the clouds were inkily black, the forecast set for heavy rain, with most of those walking along Broad Street or around Radcliffe Square wearing raincoats and carrying umbrellas. The majority of these people were students making their way to College Halls for their evening meals, much as their predecessors had done in earlier times, passing through the same streets, past the same familiar buildings and later returning to the same sort of accommodation, and in most cases doing some work for the morrow, when they would be listening to the same sort of lectures. Unless, perhaps, they were students of Physics or some similar discipline where breakthroughs ('Breaksthrough, if we are to be accurate, dear boy') were as regular as inaccuracies in the daily weather forecasts.

But that evening the forecast was surprisingly accurate; and at 6.45 p.m. the rains came.

Denis Cornford looked out through the window on to Holywell Street where the rain bounced off the surface of the road like arrowheads. St Peter's (Dinner, 7.00 for 7.30 p.m.) was only ten minutes' walk away but he was going to get soaked in such a downpour.

'What do you think, darling?'

'Give it five minutes. If it keeps on like this, I should get a cab. You've got plenty of time.'

'What'll you be doing?' he asked.

'Well, I don't think I'll be venturing out too far, do you?' She said it in a gentle way, and there seemed no sarcasm in her voice. She came up behind him and placed her hands on his shoulders as he stood indecisively staring out through the sheeted panes.

'Denis?'

'Mm?'

'Do you really want to be Master all that much?'

He turned towards her and looked directly into her dazzlingly attractive dark eyes, with that small circular white light in the centre of their irises - eyes which had always held men, and tempted them, and occasioned innumerable capitulations.

'Yes, Shelly. Yes, I do! Not quite so badly as Julian, perhaps. But badly enough.'

'What would you give - to be Master?'

'Most things, I suppose.'

'Give up your work?'

'A good deal of that would go anyway. It would be different work, that's all.'

'Would you give me up?'

He took her in his arms. 'Of course, I would!'

'You don't really mean-?'

He kissed her mouth with a strangely passionate tenderness.

A few minutes later they stood arm-in-arm at the window looking out at the ceaselessly teeming rain.

Til ring for a cab,' said Shelly Cornford.

On Mondays the dons' attendance at Lonsdale Dinner was usually fairly small, but Roy Porter would be there, Angela Storrs knew that: Roy Porter was almost always there. She rang him in his rooms at 6.55 p.m.

'Roy?'

'Angela! Good to hear your beautiful voice.'

'Flattery will get you exactly halfway between nowhere and everywhere.'

Til settle for that.'

'You're dining tonight?'

·Yep.'

'Would you like to come along afterwards and cheer up a lonely old lady.'

'Julian away?'

'Some Brains Trust at Reading University.'

'Shall I bring a bottle?'

'Plenty of bottles here.'

'Marvellous.'

'Nine-ish?'

'About then. Er ... Angela? Is it something you want to talk about or is it just... ?'

'Why not both?'

You want to know how things seem to be going with the election?'

'I'm making no secret of that'