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limitations on the use of foreign currency, and of the “deeply uncertain” political situation in Greece. He made his last bid for their attention as he approached the small door through which, it turned out, the candidates were expected to depart.
    “What I’d like you to think about is this,” he said. “Crete was the bridge between ancient Egypt and the beginning of civilisation in Europe. The key to our understanding of Minoan culture lies in deciphering the surviving texts; and I believe the expedition I propose could be a major step forward in helping us achieve that.”
    “Thank you,” said the chairman. “We’ll let you know.”
    Moments later Forrester was outside again in the fog. The British Museum was closed, most of its collection still hidden in disused stretches of the London Underground. Taking his life in his hands he stepped into the murk that obscured Tottenham Court Road (most of its shops still boarded up) and passed into the narrow alley leading into Rathbone Place, his footsteps sounding almost metallic in the strange yellow gloom. He drank a half pint of tasteless beer in the Wheatsheaf and failed to see anybody he knew. He had occasionally seen Dylan Thomas there, when home on leave, complaining about the boredom he suffered writing film scripts for the Ministry of Information. Once he’d seen Orwell wagging his finger at J.B. Priestley, doubtless rebuking him for excessive cheerfulness, but today there was nobody except a few BBC radio producers arguing about whether the advent of the Light Programme spelt the end of civilisation as they knew it.
    Unable – after his unsatisfactory meeting with the committee – to face the prospect of an immediate return to Oxford, Forrester left the pub, pulled the belt of his British Warm tighter to keep out the cold, and began walking south through the fog-shrouded ruins.
So might a Goth or Vandal have made his way through the smoking wreck of fallen Rome
, he thought. But then, he reminded himself, the British Empire was still intact. So far.
    Ruins befitted Soho; its seedy charm was perfectly suited to heaps of blackened bricks and weed-grown basements open to the sky for the first time since the reign of Queen Anne. Even the hand-written offers from tarts in newsagents’ windows looked more interesting in the context of fallen church spires. The phrase “Love Among the Ruins” came to his mind, and with it the memory of walking here with Barbara.
    He had met her at a club off Denmark Street and it wasn’t her beauty that first struck him, but her voice. He had turned his head as he heard her speak, and though he could never for the life of him remember what she had been saying, it was as though the sound itself came from somewhere he had always longed to be – or perhaps not longed to be, but believed existed, just out of sight, beyond the drab banality of the real world. The word
melodious
was appropriate, but it didn’t quite capture it; it was as if he was hearing an echo of a melody from the dawn of time, when the world itself was pure and unspoilt. As soon as he caught her eye she smiled at him without hesitation or self-consciousness and moments later he was laughing till his eyes watered at her description of the elderly general she drove around the countryside making snap inspections of the Home Guard.
    Most of the people around Barbara Lytton seemed to come from the same sort of background as she did: country houses; large, interconnected families; good schools; skiing holidays at Gstaad. In other circumstances this would have set his teeth on edge, but he felt as comfortable in her presence as if he had not been born in a two-up-two-down terrace house on Hessle Road or seen his father boarding the trawlers on Hull docks. Among Barbara’s many gifts was one for inclusion.
    And when, that weekend, he found himself among the party she had assembled at Cranbourne, the country house in a wooded Kentish valley that was her family home,