She then went home and consulted her mother. Mr Yarrowby did not just make aspirins, he made a great many of them. Priscilla was driven to college in a Rolls-Royce which dropped her two streets away because she was shy about her wealth, but her mother was a down-to-earth Yorkshire woman. Mrs Yarrowby had never been overcome by pigeons in the Stephansplatz, but she and Leonie were sisters under the skin.
‘Oh dear!’ said Pilly, opening her lunch box on the following day. ‘I can’t possibly eat all that – and if I leave anything my mother will be so
That was a cry to which Ruth couldn’t help rallying. Leonie’s desperate face when she stopped at one helping of sauerkraut had been a feature of her childhood. She shared Pilly’s flaky meat patties, the hard-boiled eggs, the parkin, the grapes . . . and even then there were crusts over to throw to the greedy birds which gave Ruth a special happiness.
‘Oh, Pilly, you can’t imagine how
‘You’d always be a real and proper person,’ said Pilly staunchly. ‘You’re the most real and proper person I’ve ever met.’
But it was as they sat leaning against the parapet with Ruth’s loden cloak wrapped round their shoulders against the wind, that Ruth learnt how much Pilly dreaded the onset of the Palaeontology course.
‘I’ll never get through,’ she said miserably. ‘I can’t even tell the difference between Pleistocene and plasticine.’
‘Yes you can . . . But, Pilly, why do you have to take that option? I mean, there are rather a lot of names.’
Pilly looked depressed and threw another crust into the water. ‘It’s to do with Professor Somerville.’
There was a pause. Then: ‘How is that? How is it to do with him?’
‘My father thinks he’s the perfect Renaissance man,’ said Pilly. ‘You know, he does everything. My father saw him on a newsreel about three years ago when he came back from Java with the skull of that Neanderthal lady and some other time when he was riding through Nepal on a yak. Or maybe it was a mule. You see my father had to go into a factory at fourteen and he never had a chance to do a degree or travel – that’s why he’s pushing me through college though I told him I was too stupid. And Professor Somerville is the sort of person he wants to have been.’
‘I see.’
‘He cuts all the articles about him out of the
‘How do your parents know he’s a Great Lover?’
Pilly sighed. ‘It’s in the papers. In the gossip columns. An actress called Tansy Mallet chased him all over Egypt and now he’s got some stunningly beautiful Frenchwoman he takes to the theatre – and everyone’s always trying to get him to take them on field trips. You wait till he gets back – his lectures are always absolutely packed with people from the outside. They pay the university ten pounds a year and they can go to any lecture, but it’s his they go to.’ She bit into her sandwich. ‘And there’s Bowmont too.’
‘What’s Bowmont?’
‘It’s where Professor Somerville lives. You’ll see when we go on the field course.’
‘I’m not going on the field course,’ said Ruth. ‘But what’s so special about Bowmont? I thought it was just a house with no central heating?’
Pilly shook her head. ‘It can’t be because Turner painted it.’
‘Well, he painted a lot of things, didn’t he? Cows and sunsets and shipwrecks?’
‘Maybe – but everyone wants to go there all the same. Oh, Ruth, I’ll never do it. All those names – Jurassic and Mesozoic and on and on . . .’
‘You will do it,’ said Ruth, setting her jaw. ‘We’ll make lists – a list for the bathroom, a list for the lavatory . . . I expect you’ve got a lot of bathrooms so you can have a lot of lists and I’ll hear you every day. They’re only
The weather was fine that first week at Thameside and for Ruth everything was a delight. Dr Felton’s lectures, the first rehearsal of the Bach Choir which cost nothing to join and sent the sound of the B Minor Mass soaring over the campus. She coached Pilly, she made friends with a Ph.D. student in the German Department and persuaded him that Rilke, when properly spoken, was not a madman but a poet – and she was faithful to the sheep.
