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‘Now, I feel rather too tired.’
    Bill spoke to the driver and told him to make sure he got to his room in the Yarumba Motel.
    â€˜St Peter’s, driver,’ said Professor Belville-Smith. ‘And drive carefully if you please.’
    The car moved off, and they all wandered back to thehouse. The party was undoubtedly breaking up, and tempers were frayed. Lucy found Peter Day in the middle of a highly anatomical description to a yellow rose-bush, and told her husband to throw him out. Merv Raines had found some cooking sherry in the kitchen cupboard, and was sharing it around among a favoured few.
    â€˜Do you think he understood the point I was trying to make about Henry Handel Richardson?’ he asked Bill.
    â€˜Don’t suppose he even heard it,’ said Bill.
    â€˜Bloody pommies are all alike,’ said Merv. ‘And elderly pommies even more so.’
    â€˜Perhaps if you’d got hold of him before you were both pissed to the rooftops,’ said Bill.
    â€˜I simply can’t understand the need of some people to drink,’ said Beatrice Porter to Alice O’Brien.
    â€˜What do you use — vinegar?’ said Alice.
    â€˜Just like the Wickhams to let the drink run out,’ said Mrs McKay, a little tipsily, to Mrs Lullham. ‘They’re only academics, after all, however much they try to hide it. It’s not the sort of thing I’d like to happen.’
    â€˜Back to the prison-house,’ said Miss Tambly to Mr Doncaster at the door. ‘Still, makes a change to get out once in a while, doesn’t it? See how the outside world lives.’
    â€˜Yes, indeed,’ said Mr Doncaster. Since the Drummondale School was an institution of infinitely higher prestige than the Methodist Ladies’ College, he felt compelled to add: ‘I find the difficult thing, though, is to limit the number of invitations.’
    â€˜Funny. I’ve never found that,’ said Miss Tambly.
    â€˜So glad you could come,’ said Lucy Wickham to Mrs Turberville at the door, closely watched by Bill Bascomb. ‘I wish you could have heard him tell us about his meeting with Jane Austen. Fascinating!’
    By nine-thirty next morning Lucy Wickham had been immortalized by a further celebrated comment, destined to be quoted long after Drummondale knew her no more.

CHAPTER VI
BODY
    P ROFESSOR W ICKHAM was giving a tutorial. Or rather, he was being given one. Every year he put Hardy as late in the term as possible, hoping that by then his first-year students would have become reasonably chatty. This was because he never could be quite sure which Hardy novel it was he had read. Whichever it was, it had left on his mind a vague impression of doom and landscape, but nothing much else remained. So he sat there, encouraging the students to tell him about their response to The Return of the Native , and letting his mind wander freely over his own personal concerns.
    Lucy had been angry this morning. It had been a pleasure to get away to the University, even though she had only given him toast for breakfast on the grounds that they couldn’t afford anything more. If you give a party, Wickham thought, you must expect the drink to go. It was quite unreasonable to get annoyed about it — but then, reason and Lucy had merely an occasional friendship of convenience. Someone or other, aggravated beyond endurance presumably by her lack of logic, had once given her Thinking To Some Purpose , and now and then she would produce some scrap which remained from her reading of it to demolish him in argument. Otherwise her mind had been quite unaffected.
    Still, at least the party had not been a total disaster. If Professor Belville-Smith had been bored, he had nonetheless stayed for a long time, and talked to a lot of people. This was an improvement on some of their other visiting celebrities. Professor Wickham doubted whether his ownstaff had shown up in a sparkling light