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twenty oh-three
. Stands the calendar at twenty oh-three and is there honey still for tea? Nobody would remember Rupert Brooke by then. Nor have tea, with bread and honey. There used to be a country called England…
    He was aware she was talking. He had been momentarily back in Cambridge, sitting in his room, waiting for his friends to come back from the river.
    “I am,” she said, “although people often didn’t realise it. Harry and I, you see, were both taken to be English because of the way we spoke. We didn’t have a Scottish accent because our class—and I’m sorry to have to use such an objectionable term, but there is no other way of saying it—because our class was brought up to speak in the same way as a certain sort of English person. That’s an old story in Scotland, the rejection of the Scots tongue, but it did happen. We started to spurn our own language, even if we kept a few words as mementos, so to speak. Words like
dreich
that we use as occasional shibboleths. That’s another interesting word, isn’t it? The shibboleth was your password to whatever you wanted to get into—or out of. I suppose you had to use the shibboleth to avoid being stoned or put to the sword, or something of that nature.
    “Maybe it was because of that problem of misidentification that he made much of being Scottish. And it can’t have helped to be sent off to that school in Perthshire that pretended to be English.”
    She had been looking out of the window as she spoke; now she looked at him.
    “I’m so sorry,” she said. “How tactless of me. You probably went to one of those places yourself.”
    He reassured her that he had not taken offence. “I went to school in England. A place called Marlborough,” he said.
    She nodded. “You were at the Courtauld Institute, weren’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “You studied under the Poussin man…what was he called?”
    “Blunt. Anthony Blunt. I didn’t know him all that well. I found him rather formal in his manner.”
    She smiled. “Like a painting by Poussin?”
    “Yes, you could say that. There’s a reason why we like this artist rather than that one.”
    He picked up the photograph again. “May I?”
    “Of course. I should put them in a proper album, but there’s something depressing about putting photographs away. It’s rather like filing something that shouldn’t be filed—like reducing something full of meaning and association to a…to a specimen. As lepidopterists do.”
    He laughed. “We all have a slight tendency to lepidoptery.”
    He examined the photograph more closely.
    “That’s you holding the pony, I take it? And that’s him in his kilt.” He paused. “What on earth is he riding?”
    “It was a sort of tricycle,” she explained. “It was a museum piece even then—it had belonged to his father as a boy. I remember it squeaking terribly.”
    “And the other little girl?”
    “She was their farm manager’s daughter. She was always hanging about, hoping we’d play with her.”
    “He looks very unhappy about something.”
    She smiled. “He probably thought I was trying to push him around. I thought he was stubborn—I couldn’t understand why boys seemed so unwilling to do as they were told.” She glanced at her visitor. “On the subject of happiness, how ubiquitous do you think unhappiness is today?”
    He was unprepared for the question. “I’m not sure if I know how to answer that.”
    “What I mean is this: Are we happier today because we know a lot more than we knew then? Are we happier because Freud came along and showed us why we were making ourselves unhappy? Are we happier because of the sexual revolution?” She paused, and looked out of the window again. “Out there—in Italy—are people happier because they can say boo to the local priest? I think they are.”
    He ventured an opinion. “The Italians seem to have been happy in spite of religion.”
    “Or because of it? Remember that Catholicism is only