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strongly as that. One Hooker or another was, of course, inevitable. He was part of a debriefing process (as the laity might call it) not properly to be declined or escaped. Last time, and under the guidance of old Dr Hunter, George had, as it were, debriefed his debriefing and rejoined the fold. George believed that nothing of the sort would happen this time. And he recalled that Dr Hunter had turned up at Plumley at a seemly interval after his own arrival. There had been correspondence, a written invitation from George’s sister-in-law to his clerical colleague and friend: that sort of thing. But this time it all seemed to be hustle and huddle and hugger-mugger. (George repeated these uneuphonious words to himself almost resentfully.) He was going to return home under a species of wardenship – or wardership, if there were such a word – exercised by Father Hooker. Not even, so to speak, on parole! George remembered that his nephew Charles had some comical word for anybody exercising Father Hooker’s office, although he couldn’t for the moment recall what it was.
    With only a short warning from reflections of this sort, it came to George that he very much didn’t want to arrive at Plumley in the custody of Father Hooker. It would be indecorous – as if he had taken to something like compulsively pinching young women’s bottoms in the street and had to be kept an eye on round the clock if there weren’t to be little paragraphs in the papers with the word ‘clergyman’ in a headline. It would be just like that. Successive trains, perhaps yes. But the same train, decidedly no.
    No sooner had this resolution been formed than their present joint train slowed down again. On a number of small placards in succession appeared the word, ‘Oxford’. Wasting no time, yet without flurry, George Naylor stood up and reached down his suitcase. He took a moment to relish Father Hooker’s surprise and displeasure, and then explained himself without recourse even to a shade of equivocation.
    ‘I think I’ll get off here,’ he said. ‘Please tell Mary’ – Mary was the name of Edward’s wife – ‘that I’ll be on the early-evening train and get a cab out to Plumley. You’ll find one of my nephews, I think, waiting for you at the station with the car.’
    And thus George found himself in his old university town. Like Cardinal Newman on that abortive visit to Mark Pattison, he hadn’t been there for quite some time.
     
    It was the middle of the Long Vacation, and Oxford would therefore be ‘empty’ in the sense that London used to be described as ‘empty’ when people had gone off to watch yachts at Cowes or to shoot small birds in Scotland. But as much here as in London the ‘empty’ concept was purely notional, industry and tourism between them having swamped anything of academic appearance or disappearance on the streets. Only the large number of moderately ancient and for the most part architecturally unimaginative buildings distinguished the place from any other English city of equivalent size.
    George parked his suitcase in one of a nest of metal lock-up boxes, not without a thought (for such is the era of our narrative) that a time-bomb might be ticking next door, or even ingeniously programmed to explode as he operated on his own box. He then headed for the dreaming spires. The first spire was presumably dreaming of Lord Nuffield, who late in the day had insisted upon its incongruous superimposition upon the tower of the college he had donated to the university and later come grimly to refer to as the Kremlin. Presumably, George thought, Nuffield’s first batch of dons had turned out to show a faint tinge of pink.
    Knowing that he ought not thus to have thought frivolously of a major benefactor who had once been a bicycle boy, George took off his hat to Nuffield College as he walked past its little gateway on New Road. He was feeling almost light-hearted. Here in Oxford, after all, were men of his own