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Road, pedestrianised now that the bypass spared it so much traffic. Such traffic as remained had to take a narrower road between the oldest cottages, and she wouldn't have been surprised if Sam had pointed out the contradiction yet again. Instead he was so quiet that she broke the silence once she was past all the schoolbound children she had to watch out for. "So where did you get to after you went to the Arbour?"

    At first he seemed too preoccupied with the oncoming woods to answer. The bark of the tree-trunks was outlined by shadow black as soil, as if the trees had been disinterred overnight.
    "Just drove," he said with a frown that looked oddly like a struggle to remember, "and walked."

    "Did visiting your grandfather upset you, Sam?"
    "Maybe."

    He turned to gaze past her into the woods, ranks of trees marching backwards as if to reconfigure a secret pattern, though the depths of the forest appeared not to move. She refrained from disturbing him again until they were past the Arbour, where she glimpsed her father at his window, holding the curtains wide with both hands. Abruptly Sam muttered "He said you asked him something in the woods. You never told me what you found there."

    Her answer hardly seemed worth the effort of recalling. "I'm sure I did. Just your grandfather and some of the others."

    "And you helped bring them back, but did anything else happen?"

    "I asked him a question, apparently."

    "He says the answer's Selcouth."

    "I've no idea what that means. I'll have to look it up."

    She saw trees rear up in the mirror before shrinking under the sun; she saw a truck lurching from lane to lane beside them, although there was no wind. For a change the motorway came as a relief; it gave her more of a reason to concentrate and leave behind the glimpse of Lennox at his window. She sensed Sam's impatience, presumably with her speed-it could hardly have to do with the word she needed to research.

    Beyond the city streets mined with children bound for school, the university brandished its towers at the graveyard crown of Mercy Hill. She drove past the campus into the dilapidated Victorian streets that had become the student quarter. As she wondered unhappily whether Sam would ever be able to walk without a limp they came in sight of Worlds Unlimited, and she gasped on his behalf. His colleagues were on the pavement outside the shop, and so was most of the glass of the window.

    Blonde long-haired Andy trudged to the car. "Has much been taken?" Heather said.

    "Just about nothing. They didn't even care enough for books to steal them."

    "Chucked a few about and did some other things with them," Dinah said, wrinkling her nose, an action that involved her whole small oval face.

    "Police been?" said Sam, climbing with some awkwardness out of the car.

    "We've called them," Andy told him. "We can't clear up till they come in case there are prints."

    "I'll leave you to it, shall I?" Heather felt a little guilty for saying. "I'll pick you up after work, Sam, if I don't see you there."

    So now she had another worry to add to the pile, she thought as she drove off: whether he would be forced to quit this job before he found something more permanent. That took its place on top of the question of what he was going to do with his life, not to mention whether he shouldn't have decided that by now, though was any of the problem how she herself had clung to the first steady job she could find? These thoughts and a gang of their friends kept up with her as she parked the car and made her way across the sunlit frost-bleached campus.

    The echoes of her footsteps dulled as she left the sandstone corridor. All the computer terminals on the library tables were showing fog. She dropped her handbag on her desk and headed for the reference section; though she could have looked the word up on the computer, she still preferred to hold a book.

    selcouth (sel-couth) strange, marvellous, wonderful, [from OE seldan seldom, cuth