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to Marcus Potter, with whom she did not sleep, and towards whom she felt an exasperated maternal responsibility combined with a complete respect for his closed-off, humming mathematical mind. Marcus was not quite of this world, not quite real, and Jacqueline, as she began to understand the extent of her own ambitions, began to suspect that she had chosen him for this reason. He was so clearly an impossible candidate for the orange blossoms, veilings, and organ, let alone for tenderly cooked little dinners by candle-light, or electric brushings of naked skin in the bathroom, that it was possible for her to go on working, to put her exams, her thesis, the snails, and now the physiology of memory first, without thinking of herself as a freak. She needed to appear unobtrusive and ordinary. She did not even have to think about that. You got on better (at least if you were a woman) if no one noticed you.
    Frederica the schoolgirl had known she would be
someone,
had known eyes would be on her, fame would touch her, people would know who she was when she walked down a street. She had wanted everything—love, sex, the life of the mind. She had tried marriage, and had Leo, and made a small living as best she might. Jacqueline thought of herself as a lesser, more shadowy being than Marcus’s brilliant sister. But she was beginning to recognise the inexorable force of her own curiosity, her desire to know the next thing, and then the next, and then the next. It lived in her like a bright dragon in a cave, it had to be fed, it must not be denied, it would destroy her if she did not feed it ... The next thing was to explain as much as was necessary of all this to Lyon Bowman. She wanted to say to Luk “you are too good for me, I won’t ever give you enough attention.” But she knew that silence was better. Luk, she thought hopefully, would transfer all that to someone else, and then they could go on comfortably.
    Luk had a repeating dream about Jacqueline. In it she was—some of the time—a brown bird. Most often, she was a bird of that wonderful dusky, brown-black of female blackbirds, and had a sharp gold beak, and gold eyes where her own were brown. Often this bird was more the size of a large pheasant than that of a blackbird, proud and quick. It would appear amongst the
Cepea nemoralis
where he had been expecting to see the woman, and would busy itself with gathering the shells and piling them on the anvil-stone. He would know (it was a simple dream) that he should not creep up on it, and yet would, and it would watch him, its dark feathered head on one side, its gold beak glittering. Sometimes, not often, it would extract the snails from the shells, and they would dangle, squirming and stretching, from the bill. Once he closed his hands round it, and for a moment it seemed almost to nestle there, warm and feathery. Then he felt its heart go faster and faster, and knew he must let go or kill it, and woke, in the sweat of the decision. It was a very simple dream, he considered. But that wasn’t the point, it couldn’t be reduced to its simple meaning. The brown feathers, the watchfulness, the fine twig-legs, the rapid thrum of the overexcited tiny heart changed him, changed her in him. He thought scientifically about this, too. When she got into the memory-stores of the brain would she find how a woman can become a bird in the skull of a sleeping man?

Chapter 3
    The Vice-Chancellor was up early, as usual. He sat behind his vast desk (he was an abnormally tall man, nearly 6 feet 5 inches) and looked out at what he thought of as “his” lawn, knowing it was not. His Lodgings were in one corner of the ground floor of Long Royston Hall, the Elizabethan house given to the new university by its owner, Matthew Crowe, who still inhabited part of it. From one window Sir Gerard Wijnnobel could see the formal terrace where Frederica, in shift and farthingale, had strutted as the young Elizabeth, in