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days before it was revealed that his Christian name was Rudolf.
    And apart from those passengers, there were also the officers of the two embarked battalions, young subalterns doing their National Service, and more senior officers who had the air of men grown old beyond their years because they had seen action in Suez, in Palestine, in Korea, in the war. The CO of one of the battalions was accompanied by his wife, and she became the doyenne of the civilian passengers, seated regally at the captain’s table while lesser beings were invited to dine there on a rotation whose precise details seemed as arcane as the rankings of the British peerage.
    Dee hid behind her seasickness and her faint Yorkshire accent and watched all this whenever she could. Paula was often somewhere else, playing with children from the other families on board, and for much of the time Dee lay in her bunk while the world of their cabin twisted and turnedaround her, and her stomach with it. Binty referred to Dee’s complaint as
mal de mer
, as though you needed to be French to feel pukey. ‘You’ll be over it in a while,’ she assured her. But for the moment it appeared a permanent state, like being a semi-invalid.

Three
    Thomas is giving a class at the university. The class is on the historical method: Historiography, Module 101, worth twenty credits towards History, Modern, Single Honours. It consists of a dozen youths – eight girls and four boys. In a strange way he thinks of his students as more or less his contemporaries. Objectively that has long since ceased to be the case, but he has always suffered from a curious illusion: that whenever he is with a group of people he is always the youngest in the room. This is still plausible enough at meetings of the Academic Liaison Committee, chaired by the Vice-Chancellor and presided over by half a dozen bores who remember when the place was still a polytechnic; but sustaining the idea in the present company amounts to some kind of minor delusion. Nothing to awaken the interest of a psychiatrist, but definitely bizarre.
    ‘Never forget,’ Thomas says, ‘that the word “history” is cognate with the word “story”. What I mean to say by this is thathistory is, essentially, a narrative. Just like a novelist, the historian is creating a narrative intended to explain something.’
    A hand goes up. ‘What does “cognate” mean?’
    ‘Related to.’
    ‘So why didn’t you say that?’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘Why use complicated words when a simple one will do?’ The speaker is a youth of about twenty (they are all youths of about twenty) with a prominent Adam’s apple. This, more than the length of his hair or the structure of his body, defines him as male.
    ‘Sorry, I didn’t get your name.’
    ‘Eric.’ Eric cocks his head to one side, as though saying his name is some kind of challenge. His black T-shirt has TUNC written across the front.
    ‘Well, Eric, do you like Indian food? Curry, stuff like that?’
    ‘Yeah.’ He draws the word out into at least three distinct phonemes. Clearly he feels that this has suddenly become an interrogation; he is reluctant to admit anything.
    ‘But when you were a kid, I’ll bet you preferred burgers. Well, words are like that. Grown-ups can usually manage rather more demanding fare than kids.’
    The class laughs, all except Eric. Thomas has won, but it is a temporary victory, a mere skirmish. Eric will counter-attack later on, and every week throughout the life of the class. He will counter-attack and eventually he will destroy any group feeling that the class may acquire, and thereby he will win.
    Thomas continues: ‘The fictional narrative is created out of ideas in the novelist’s mind; so too the historical narrative. The difference is that the historical narrative is expected to operate within certain bounds: it has to pay attention to the various bits of evidence that exist – documents in archives, pieces of physical evidence, archaeological