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holidays to make preliminary arrangements for the year’s final feast.
    It was while discussing details of the package with the amiable manager that a thought suddenly struck her which she put at the back of her head to make way for the business on hand. However, on the way home she came back to her thought: I’m running the school alone. Rowland might as well be one of the students. He is hardly one of the staff. He does nothing but his creative writing class now, and hardly that. Originally Rowland had taken Social History, Modern Art and Photography. It was all textbook stuff. Nina found it quite simple to take on these classes when Rowland became immersed more and more in his novel. Simple, but not easy. She had far too much to do. The school fees were very high and the students were entitled to something like what their parents paid for.
    At home, Rowland was in the study frowning over his novel. Nina had made up her mind to tell Rowland right away that she was doing much more than her fair share of the school, that she felt overburdened. She sat down at her desk, ready to speak, and she did; but her words that came out were:
    “You fancy Mary Foot, don’t you?”
    “Oh, don’t start all that again. Mary’s shy. I had to try and bring her out.”
    “Well, I think she prefers me to you, if you want an honest opinion.”
    “At this moment,” he said, “I am not taking opinions. I am writing a book.”
    “Or is it Pansy?” she said. “Maybe it’s Pansy who keeps you awake.”
    Their row blew over, all about something quite different, as it was, from the main cause.
    In any case, it was always their quiet, working boarder, Chris, who occupied Rowland’s mind. Everything else was peripheral. Rowland told himself that the novel Chris was rapidly producing would be, at best, a popular, not an artistic, success. The fact that Chris was only seventeen—perhaps, when and if the book should be published, eighteen, would stand in his favor. At eighteen a successful historical novelist . . .
    Rowland wrote:
    “The two visitors, young aunt and somewhat older nephew, walked sedately up the path.” He took out “sedately” and put in “carelessly.” Then he took that out and put in “casually.” Then he wrote, “She still had a slight limp.”
    But she had been looking for Chris, anyhow. Red-haired Chris.
    Rowland, before he had graduated from Oxford, had already written a play for the National Theatre which was a young-person success. It was followed by the offer of play after play by Rowland which, according to his agents, “you couldn’t give away.” He changed agents. They still “couldn’t give away” Rowland’s stuff.
    His marriage to Nina, and the help of a good legacy, put his nerves to rights for the time being. Their itinerant finishing schools had been satisfying. And now, this lust of Rowland’s to write a novel. He was sure he could do it. He remembered the days, eight years ago, when he had achieved the play, and its reception, a month of performances and good critics talking about his future. I am not yet thirty, he reflected. I can make it happen again. A novel has a beginning, a middle and an end. So said Aristotle and so he had advised his creative writing class. A beginning, a middle and an end. Chris had said, “Do you need to begin at the beginning and end at the end? Can’t a writer begin in the middle?”
    “That has been tried quite often,” Rowland replied, “but it tends toward confusion.”
    Chris didn’t seem to care about this aspect. He seemed to have a built-in sense of narrative architecture and balance.
    “Too much individualism,” thought Rowland. “He is impeding me. I wish he could peacefully die in his sleep.”
    I am awfully young, thought Nina, to be tied to a man who is married to a novel. Or perhaps engaged to a novel as it isn’t yet real. She longed for Rowland to become Master of an Oxford or Cambridge college. She wanted to be married to a scholar.