Read Online Remember Me... by Melvyn Bragg - Free Book Online Page B

the offing. Turney on his third tutorial hour of the morning was aching to get on with his own work in the afternoon, already switched on to it, lending a mere fraction of his mind to the present, a trick he could also manage at the concerts and operas to which his cultivated Italian wife zealously drove him. Joe had begun to follow the panic-fashion ofgetting up very early on the day of a morning tutorial and finishing the essay by relying on the drive of the deadline, collapsing arguments into lists and filling with waffle the gaps left by inadequate preparation. Oxford, Roderick maintained, was a world leader in the higher waffle.
    Turney let him endure a serious interval of silence after the final blustered paragraph and then opened up and spared him nothing. It was quite merciless. Joe did not have the guns to return fire and he was honest enough with himself to give up the attempt early on. When it was done, the tutor glanced at his watch. There was still twenty minutes to go. He would steal ten.
    â€˜Sherry?’
    Joe accepted the unexpected treat with suspicion. They sipped.
    â€˜If you want a decent degree you’ll have to pull your socks up. You know that.’
    â€˜Yes.’ The sherry felt strong. He was suddenly tired from the frantic morning.
    â€˜My guess is that you’ve already decided against trying for a first.’ Turney sank his face behind long steepled hands. ‘Making a film, writing for
Cherwell
, that sort of thing.’
    Joe nodded: it was a reprieve of sorts.
    â€˜You mustn’t let it drift too far, Richardson.’
    â€˜Sorry about that.’ He indicated the sheets of paper now on the floor.
    â€˜More or less a waste of time for both of us.’
    â€˜I agree.’ Joe thought this owning up was rather man to man and felt somehow enhanced by the exchange.
    â€˜Mrs Harries has laid complaints against you, I’m afraid.’
    The floor would not open up and let him disappear. He wanted to look away but found his gaze locked onto the eyes of a man who was not giving him an inch.
    â€˜I am your moral tutor as well as everything else.’
    â€˜I know,’ Joe agreed eagerly, appealingly, he hoped.
    â€˜Mrs Harries is a much valued landlady and servant of this college. She reports that despite clumsy attempts at a cover-up by Roderick, you have not spent the night there on, she reports, at least three occasions during the last week alone.’
    A response was clearly called for and Joe found none.
    â€˜I presume it is what I guess it is.’
    â€˜Yes.’ The syllable crawled all the way up a long dry throat, over a barely living tongue, fell lamely through crumpling worried lips and scarcely made the short distance between them.
    â€˜Is she up?’
    â€˜No.’ Joe felt more confident in denying that she was at the university which would have been more serious: there was even the bud of virtue in his denial.
    â€˜Town girl?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜For pity’s sake, Richardson!’
    â€˜An art student.’
    â€˜Ah!’ Turney swept the sherry down. ‘What do I do with Mrs Harries? The college cannot afford to lose a landlady with her length of service and she’s hopping mad.’
    â€˜I’m sorry.’
    â€˜Joseph.’ Joe felt the Christian name like a blow to the back of his neck. ‘This is a moral matter. If you continue to flout the rules I will have little option but to send you down. Expel you. For a few weeks at least and at a most inconvenient time. You could miss Finals.’ Turney looked at his watch.
    Joe was stunned. To be expelled from Oxford was to be eternally disgraced, to let down his schoolteachers, to expose his parents to public shame, to find himself among the damned.
    He tried to swallow but his Adam’s apple had trebled in size.
    â€˜Don’t be an ass. Bluff out the weekends, Saturdays only, Friday in extremis, a trip, a visit, but through the week you