that matter, whether either Richard had been on either Crusade. Life was suddenly very good again. He thought of Monica. Perhaps he would call in — just for a second — before they started the business of the afternoon. Monica. . It must have been the wine.
They finally arrived back at the Syndicate building at twenty minutes to three; and whilst the others were making their leisurely way back to the Revision Room upstairs, Quinn himself walked quickly along the corridor and gently knocked on the furthest door on the right, whereon the name plate read. MISS M. M. HEIGHT. He tentatively opened the door and looked in. No one. But he saw a note prominently displayed beneath a paperweight on the neatly cleared desk, and he stepped inside to read it. 'Gone to Paolo's. Back at three.' It was typical of their office life together. Bartlett never minded his staff coming and going just when and how they liked, so long as their work was adequately done. What he did insist upon, however (almost pathologically), was that everyone should keep him informed about exactly where they could be found. So. Monica had gone to have her comely hair coiffured. Never mind. He didn't know what he would have said, anyway. Yes, it was just as well: he would see her in the morning.
He walked up to the Revision Room, where Cedric Voss was leaning back in his chair, his eyes half-closed, an inane grin upon his flabby, somnolent features. 'Well, gentlemen. Can we please try to turn our attention to the Hanoverians?'
CHAPTER TWO
BY THE MIDDLE of the nineteenth century radical reforms were afoot in Oxford; and by its end a series of Commissions, Statutes, and Parliamentary Bills had inaugurated changes which were to transform the life of both Town and Gown. The University syllabuses were extended to include the study of the emergent sciences, and of modern history; the high academic standards set by Benjamin Jowett's Balliol gradually spread to other colleges; the establishment of professorial chairs increasingly attracted to Oxford scholars of international renown; the secularization of the college fellowships began to undermine the traditionally religious framework of university discipline and administration; and young men of Romanist, Judaic, and other strange persuasions were now admitted as undergraduates, no longer willy-nilly to be weaned on Cicero and Chrysostom. But, above all, university teaching was no longer concentrated in the hands of the celibate and cloistered clergymen, some of whom, as in Gibbon's day, well remembered that they had a salary to receive, and only forgot that they had a duty to perform; and many of the newly-appointed fellows, and some of the old, forswore the attractions of bachelor rooms in the college, got themselves married, and bought houses for themselves, their wives, their offspring, and their servants, immediately outside the old spiritual centre of Holywell and the High, the Broad and St. Giles'; especially did they venture north of the great width of tree-lined St. Giles', where the Woodstock and the Banbury Roads branched off into the fields of North Oxford, towards the village of Summertown.
A traveller who visits Oxford today, and who walks northward from St. Giles', is struck immediately by the large, imposing houses, mostly dating from the latter half of the nineteenth century, that line the Woodstock and the Banbury Roads and the streets that cross their ways between them. Apart from the blocks of weathered yellow stone round the white-painted window frames, these three-storeyed houses are built of attractive reddish brick, and are roofed with small rectangular tiles, more of an orange-red, which slope down from the clustered chimney stacks aslant the gabled windows. Today few of the houses are occupied by single families. They are too large, too cold, and too expensive to maintain; the rates are too high and salaries (it is said) are too low, and the fast-disappearing race of domestic servants demands a colour telly in the sitting-room. So it is that most of the houses have been let into flats, converted into hotels, taken over by doctors, by dentists, by English Language schools for foreign students, by University faculties, by hospital departments — and, in the case of one large and well-appointed property in Chaucer Road, by the Foreign Examinations Syndicate.
The Syndicate building stands some twenty yards back from the comparatively quiet road which links the busy Banbury and Woodstock thoroughfares, and is modestly sheltered from inquisitive eyes behind a row of tall horse-chestnut trees. It is approached from the front (there is no back entrance) by a curving gravelled drive, allowing space sufficient for the parking of a dozen or so cars. But the Syndicate staff has grown so much of late that this space is now inadequate, and the drive has been extended along the left-hand side of the building, leading to a small concreted yard at the rear, where it has become the custom of the graduates themselves to park their cars.
There are five graduates on the permanent staff of the Syndicate, four men and one woman, severally superintending the fields of study corresponding, in the main, to the disciplines which they had pursued for their university degrees, and to the subjects taught in their subsequent careers. For it is an invariable rule that no graduate may apply for a post with the Syndicate unless he (or she) has spent a minimum of five years teaching in the schools. The names of the five graduates are printed in bold blue letters at the top of the Syndicate's official notepaper; and on such notepaper, in a large converted bedroom on the first floor, on Friday, 31st October (the day after Quinn's deliberations with the History Committee), four of the five young shorthand typists are tapping out letters to the headmasters and headmistresses of those overseas schools (a select, but growing band) who are happy to entrust the public examination of their O- and A-level candidates to the Syndicate's benevolence and expertise. The four girls pick at their typewriters with varying degrees of competence; frequently one of them leans forward to delete a mis-spelling or a careless transposition of letters; occasionally a sheet is torn from a typewriter carriage, the carbon salvaged, but the top sheet and the under-copies savagely consigned to the wastepaper basket. The fifth girl has been reading
T. G. Bartlett, PhD, MA Secretary
P. Ogleby, MA Deputy Secretary
G. Bland, MA
Miss M. M Height, MA
D. J. Martin, BA
Beneath the last name she types 'N. Quinn, MA'—her new boss.
After Margaret Freeman had left him, Quinn opened one of his filing cabinets, took out the drafts of the History question papers, deciding that a further couple of hours should see them ready for press. All in all, he felt quite pleased with life. His dictation (for him, a completely new skill) had gone well, and at last he was beginning to get the knack of expressing his thoughts directly into words, instead of first having to write them down on paper. He was his own boss, too; for Bartlett knew how to delegate, and unless something went sadly askew he allowed his staff to work entirely on their own. Yes, Quinn was enjoying his new job. It was only the phones that caused him trouble and (he admitted it) considerable embarrassment. There were two of them in each office: a white one for internal extensions, and a grey one for outside calls. And there they sat, squat and menacing, on the right-hand side of Quinn's desk as he sat writing; and he prayed they wouldn't ring, for he was still unable to quell the panic which welled up within him whenever their muted, distant clacking compelled him to lift up one or other (he never knew which). But neither rang that morning, and with quiet concentration Quinn carried through the agreed string of amendments to the History questions. By a quarter to one he had finished four of the question papers, and was pleasantly surprised to find how quickly the morning had flown by. He locked the papers away (Bartlett was a
