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fellow. He’ll be your director of studies.”
    Sasha looked at the man again—what she could make out of him through the herd of miniskirts and skinny jeans.
He looksvery young to be a fellow. I hope he knows what he’s talking about.
How awful it would be to have made it to Cambridge only to be taught physics by someone second-rate. Still, one shouldn’t judge by appearances. Lots of people thought Will was a standard-issue, shallow, rugby-obsessed, public school boy when they first met him.
    Which only went to show how wrong first impressions could be.

    Professor Theo Dexter sat in his rooms at St. Michael’s hunched over his computer in a foul mood. Last week’s optimism about the new term already felt like a distant memory. So far, this year’s intake of undergraduates had been dismal. Barely a single good-looking girl among them. As for the physicists, it made you wonder what the hell the government’s two hundred million pounds of extra education spending was being spent on. Certainly not hiring decent science teachers. To think that these kids were the best that the English school system had to offer. Morons, the lot of them. God, it was depressing.
    He turned back to his book.
Cursed bloody thing.
As an academic, you were expected to publish your own work at least every few years. Most scholars, including Theresa, considered this “the fun part” and saw teaching as a distraction from their studies. For Theo it was the other way around. He found the obligation to continually reinvent the wheel and come up with new theories an immense drain on his time and energy. The truth was, he wasn’t much of an original thinker. He was bright, naturally. Unlike most of his colleagues, he was also a good communicator, with a gift for expressing the most complex ideas in theoretical physics in simple, human terms. But Theo Dexter had yet to stumble across that one seminal thought that would forever be identified with his name. Deep down he was wildly envious of his wife’s ability to come upwith new angles on Shakespearean criticism over her Special K every morning. Not that he’d ever have told
her
that. Inspiration seemed to explode out of Theresa involuntarily, like a sneeze. Theo Dexter knew that his fellow physicists considered him a plodder. If only he had half his wife’s instinctive, unstructured brilliance, they might start taking him seriously. As it was…
    A knock on the door disturbed him.
Who the hell could that be? I don’t have any supervisions this morning.
    “Yes?” He sounded less than welcoming. Tentatively the door creaked open.
    “Professor Dexter?”
    “Yes? For God’s sake, come in whoever you are. Don’t skulk in the corridor like a thief.”
    A young girl shuffled nervously into the room. Theo’s first thought was,
She’s escaped from the circus
. Dressed in baggy, striped trousers teamed with a multicolored, polka-dotted shirt, dark hair flying all over the place, mascara smudged, she looked like a lunatic. His second thought was,
She’s pretty
. It was hard to make out much of her figure beneath the billowing clothes, but the face was angelic. Porcelain-white skin, wide-set green eyes, hair as black and gleaming as liquid tar.
    “Can I help you?”
    “I’m Sasha Miller. I’ve got a supervision with you this morning. Eleven o’clock?”
    So she’s a physicist! One of mine. Thank you, God. At last.
    “Ah. Miss Miller. Well, your supervision was actually scheduled for yesterday morning. But do come in.”
    “Oh God. Was it?” Sasha blushed scarlet. “I’m terribly sorry. I’m afraid I can be a bit disorganized sometimes. I’m working on it.”
    Theo offered her a chair. In a fluster, Sasha somehow managed to miss the seat, lowering her bottom into midair and only just righting herself before she hit the floor.
    “Sorry.” She clung to the chair’s arms like life rafts.
    Theo smiled.
She’s adorable. So gauche. I wonder if she’s even eighteen yet?
    “Don’t