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the Carbonari Society next week. The time is right for me to dazzle the Carbonari with fresh thoughts (as I outstandingly failed to do with my poetry a few months ago). So my paper will be called ‘From Without’–something about the splendid difference between my life out here among the sun and the dog-roses and the black-haired beauty with the eyes like harebells who brings my breakfast, and their lives , with their whirring brains and clever bright eyes, evolving their next joke or two, in the stifling rooms of King’s.
    I am only two miles away, in Grantchester, but here there are so much better things to be concerned about, such as the white bed and the open window with the dark coming in.
    The problem is, I’m so certainly and prominently an entertainerof so many various (and possibly not continuously compatible) young people that the likelihood of my paper on Shakespeare and my essay for the Harness Prize and my paper for the Carbonari Society and my thousand letters to a thousand friends actually being written is small indeed. I do find it more pressing and a million trillion times more glorious to stand naked at the edge of the black water in perfect silence than sit in stuffy rooms thinking bespectacled thoughts.
    Two nights ago I did exactly that. The water shocked me as it came upwards with its icy-cold, life-giving embrace. Then a figure appeared: some local deity or naiad of the stream. In point of fact I know exactly who it was. It was the young maid-of-all-work, the afore-mentioned black beauty: a girl I’ve discovered is called Nellie Golightly. (Which sounds like something out of a music hall.) The sight of me turned her to stone. I acted as though it was the most normal thing in the world to me to appear naked in front of a beautiful young woman I hardly know. But then she opened her eyes again, picked up a peg that had dropped on to the lawn and marched off without a glance back. Nude young men with stunned erections are obviously de rigueur where she comes from.
    It’s impressive, this refusal of hers to be impressed. I rather like her. I resolve to swim again, tomorrow night and every night. Nell reminds me of a girl I once saw, a working girl with her fellow, standing under a lamp-post on Trinity Street, her face lit up. The intensity with which he kissed her, the freedom, the abandon, all were apparent to me in that glimpse, and then I became horribly aware of myself as proud owner of none of those qualities. Fixed there, staring, like a hungry urchin gazing at a cake in the baker’s window. A version of myself that made me shudder, melt back into the soup along with all the other dull, spectacled people from Cambridge. Oh, Grantchester…Feeling the grass between my toes, and the river sweep over my head, perhaps at last I might shake off the sensation that myhead is not attached to my body, that I am not really here at all.
    As for Nell…That sumptuous nymph, naiad, the unearthly creature…(There is something infinitely good, and gracious, in the dark shadow that forms between her breasts when she leans forward to kneel at the grate or to put something on the table. I find myself dreaming up excuses–‘Could I trouble you for another cup of milk? Yes, just there on the rather low table is fine, thank you…’–to allow me to witness it frequently.) I feel sure she is an extraordinarily intelligent girl. Her eyes, now I think of it, are not so much harebells as–the exact shade of violets in a darkening wood. And she smells divine, like honey, of course (for I have discovered that this is what she does, tend the bees, and she has a rare talent for it) and apples and grass and floor-polish. What on earth can such a girl be thinking of as she stands beside the oh-so-refined Mr Neeve with his handkerchief on his head?
    Enough about Nell. This kind of distraction will not get the Carbonari paper written.
    Last week I arranged, during the visit of one Noel Olivier, that I might be the one to