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lies about each other. And about anyone else unfortunate enough to have dealings with them.’
    ‘What sort of lies?’ I asked.
    ‘I’m sure you can imagine.’ He turned away and I could see that he was bored with the topic and I remembered how irritated he used to become at my habit of worrying at a subject in an effort to make it yield new perspectives. For Austin a fact was a fact and that was all there was to be said about it. He stood up. ‘We will go upstairs. I’ve lit a fire.’
    As we passed through the hall I noticed a package propped against the wall opposite the door of the room. I was sure it had not been there earlier.
    Austin picked it up. ‘How did that get there?’ I asked.
    ‘What do you mean?’ he replied quickly. ‘I left it there before supper to remind myself to carry it upstairs.’
    We ascended without further conversation and found a cheerful blaze in the sitting-room. While I seated myself before the fire, Austin put the package on the floor beside the other chair and lighted candles. Then he opened a bottle of rather good port and filled two glasses.
    It was like old times and made me think so vividly of what might have been that I was prompted to ask: ‘Do you remember how, when we were undergraduates, we talked of one day being fellows of the same college?’
    He shook his head. ‘Did we?’
    ‘How inspired we were by the idea of devoting ourselves to the life of the mind.’
    He smiled sarcastically. ‘I take it you believe that is possible only within a Cambridge – or just conceivably an Oxford – college?’
    ‘Not at all. For example, I’m sure the canons are intelligent men ...’
    ‘The canons!’ he interrupted. ‘I have as little as possible to do with them. They are men of very limited capacities, almost without exception. That’s why they are obsessed, most of them, by the outward forms – incense, vestments, candles and processions. The Church is full of men like that, just as the universities are. Men with no emotional life who are intellectually daring – which is easy enough – but emotionally timid.’
    ‘I’ve heard that the Chapter suffers particularly acutely from the usual conflicts between the Ritualists and the Evangelicals,’ I said, carefully avoiding Gazzard’s name.
    ‘That’s what lies behind the argument about work on the Cathedral,’ he said with a nod. ‘For some people it is nothing but a beautiful old shell and they want to preserve it unchanged because for them it has no significance beyond its material being.’
    I smiled to hide my irritation. ‘Is anyone who loves old churches to be regarded as an infidel?’
    ‘I’m talking of all those in this age who have made a religion out of things peripheral to, or other than, Christianity: music, history, art, literature.’
    He spoke with such resentment that, although the last thing I wanted was to be drawn into an argument, I felt I had to explain my position. ‘Speaking for myself, I would say that I’ve retained the moral meaning of works of art like the Cathedral but separated it from the baggage of superstition.’
    He had slumped sideways in the chair so that his legs were dangling over one arm – a habit of his that I suddenly recalled from our youth – and he now stared at me fiercely and rather ludicrously from this undignified position. He slowly repeated my words: ‘The baggage of superstition. You and your like are the purveyors of baggage. What you have done is to put together a jumble of beliefs to produce a new form of superstition that is much more dangerous than anything in Christianity. And of less use. It won’t help you with the great issues: loss, the death of those you love, the imminence of your own death.’
    ‘Is that what religion should be? A comforting fiction? I’d rather choose the truth – like the Roman Stoics or my beloved Anglo-Saxons before they were Christianized – however harsh it might be.’
    ‘There’s nothing harsher than