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sudden sense that he was going to cast her off.
    ‘So, you’re going to send me for another spin around the block,’ she said, and tried to laugh.
    ‘Well, you see, I just wish I could.’
    ‘Come on, Robert. Don’t wish things. Tell me.’
    He looked at her, his eyes not quite engaging, his face pale.
    ‘Prim, it looks like you’ve put yourself outside my help.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘I find undigested lumps of Verner and Ackland in the middle of your dissertation. I mean, we all draw on each other in a way, but we’re supposed to go through a process of making the scholarship our own and finding our own voice.’
    Prim said, ‘That’s crazy. I referred to Ackland mainly to challenge some of her conclusions.’
    Auger passed her dissertation. ‘Why don’t you look at page 25 from the paragraph beginning “On the basis of this evidence …”’
    She took the marked pages. She still had residual faith that what she had written was in place, there in the text, amenable to calm explanation. But the passage was nothing that she had written, or remembered, or even particularly agreed with.
    ‘I didn’t write this,’ she told him.
    ‘Prim … that’s the normal student denial.’ So he had reduced her in a few seconds from friend, lover and colleague to temporising student.
    She knew instantly what he had done. He had acted with a criminal determination no one would believe him capable of. For the sake of his grievous marriage, and to evade the frenzied lover asking, ‘When? When?’ he had altered her dissertation at source, on the disk. He had butchered it, robbed it of its connections, emasculated its argument and introduced undigested lumps of Verner and Ackland. Short of strangling her, he was sending her into thorough exile. He was extirpating her. And she knew even then that no one would believe he had gone to all this trouble.
    His voice trembled as he read a series of page notations he had jotted down on a notepad. ‘Turn to page 37, please. Then pages 42, 46 to 48, 53 to 55 …’
    ‘You did this,’ she said. He who was clever at word processors in an age when many scholars were still fighting a delaying war against them. He could – as the new phrase had it – ‘desk-top publish’ scholarly newsletters. So he had spent dark hours to alter matter through cut, paste,copy; to devise a new version of her dissertation. She flicked the pages and found the font correct but the contents largely strange. ‘You did this, Robert.’
    ‘Prim,’ he said, looking out the window again, ‘do you know how mad that sounds. I haven’t betrayed you. You’ve betrayed me.’ He seemed genuinely to believe it. ‘It’s like this – I don’t think for a moment your direct purpose was to cheat. You don’t need to. But I think you were actually testing me. Seeing if I would cover for you. Well, we may be great friends, Prim. But I can’t cover for you on this.’
    Everything was apparent to Prim now. ‘You want to get rid of me – from the university. From all scholarly life. You don’t want to be worried by me. You want your shitty marriage.’
    ‘That’s hysterical,’ Auger said. Men could say that, hands spread concessively, chin lowered. It was one of their best tricks.
    ‘My God, I didn’t want to test you. I wanted to impress you. And I did. The real text. Weren’t you impressed?’
    ‘I can’t be impressed with that,’ he said, nodding to the text in her hands.
    ‘I have another copy of what I wrote at home.’
    ‘Of course you do,’ he said. ‘After all, weeks have passed since you put this one in.’
    ‘Look, Robert, you know me. I’ve got too much intellectual vanity to play this sort of game.’ Could someone else have done it, altered the text? A jealous woman student? ‘Someone has tampered with this, and if it’s not you, then I apologise.’
    ‘I should think so,’ said Auger. ‘You do me very little credit, Prim.’
    ‘How much credit do you do me?’ she