‘Taste?’ Philippa offered, holding up a ladle.

Philippa was wearing a pair of Archie’s trousers and a fisherman’s smock in a thick brown moleskin material, and had tied an Indian silk scarf, Apache-style, around her hair. She trawled for something in the pocket of her smock and netted a new and very sleepy McFluffy. After trying in vain to rouse it, she stuffed it back in her pocket. Somewhere in the depths of the house I could hear the sound of energetic hoovering.

I was sitting at one end of the McCues’ huge pine kitchen table sipping reluctantly at a cup of acrid coffee that Philippa had forced on me. Goneril, looking cross-eyed in the morning light, was slumped on an essay entitled, ‘How can I tell whether what seems to be a memory of mine is in fact a genuine one?’ She was washing herself indolently, every now and then dislodging little feathery dandelion tufts of feline fur that floated through the air. I watched one of them land delicately in the soup.

‘I think she’s got some kind of mange,’ Philippa said, chucking the cat under the chin.

The salmon, a little the worse for wear – indeed, only half of it now remained – occupied the centre of the table. It had been poached for the party and in an effort to restore it to life its silver-lamé skin had been replaced with cucumber slices and its dead eye with a stuffed olive. It wasn’t fully dressed; many of its cucumber scales had fallen off, revealing pink flesh underneath. Here and there a few flakes of skin still lingered like the scurf of stars. A row of cooked shrimp had been placed along its back, perhaps as a garnish, perhaps as a misguided attempt to recreate its spinal cord.

‘You didn’t come to our party,’ Philippa chided, throwing a huge handful of salt in the soup.

‘Sorry. I had to write an essay.’

It was cold in the Windsor Place kitchen, that horrible damp cold that makes you feel suddenly melancholy. All the windows were misted up from the soup-making and from the rack of wet laundry that was hanging over the radiator. I cast a cursory glance over the clothes, wondering if any of them belonged to Ferdinand, some intimate garment perhaps that had touched his skin, but all I caught a glimpse of was a pair of Archie’s huge, slightly grey Y-fronts and quickly looked away. No wonder all the McCues always smelt faintly of cooking. Except for Ferdinand, of course.

‘So, how’s Ferdinand?’ I asked Philippa, trying to sound off-hand.

‘Oh, you know Ferdinand?’ Philippa said. ‘How nice.’

The sound of the vacuuming grew more insistent until finally Mrs McCue hoovered herself into the room on the end of a Goblin cylinder. She was followed by Mrs Macbeth, who had slung a net bag from her walking-frame to act as a container for cleaning materials – a tin of Mansion House polish, a box of Flash, a large bottle of Parozone, a pink bottle of Windolene – things that had probably never seen the inside of the McCue house before. Bringing up the rear, Duke shouldered his way into the kitchen. I almost expected to see a feather duster in his mouth.

Mrs McCue hoovered noisily over the vinyl, picking up anything in her path – egg-shells and cabbage stalks, broken pencils, assorted grit, bushels of cat fur, the odd Brussels sprout. Finally, to my relief, she switched the machine off and said, ‘That’s enough for now.’

Sensing the need for an explanation, Philippa said, ‘Good old Ma’s doing some cleaning for me. And her friend, too, of course,’ she added.

‘Just making ourselves useful,’ Mrs McCue said.

‘That bathroom,’ Mrs Macbeth said sotto voce to me, shaking her head in disbelief. She waved the bottle of Parozone like a Molotov cocktail.

‘They let you out again then?’ I asked.

‘They don’t keep them under lock and key,’ Philippa said irritably, ‘it’s not a prison. And anyway, they’re always out. They’re never in.’

Mrs McCue muttered something under her breath as she sat down next to me. Goneril opened one evil eye and assessed her fearlessly.

‘Lunch,’ Philippa said. I made a move to escape; I couldn’t think of anything worse than eating Philippa’s soup, but Mrs McCue laid a heavy hand on my arm and said, ‘It is nice to see you.’

Philippa slopped soup into bowls and slung a large sliced Sunblest onto the table with a thud that made Goneril flinch but not move.

‘Unhygienic,’ Mrs McCue hissed, giving the cat a surreptitious pinch. Goneril ground her body further into the essay, as if digging in for the duration. Maisie flung herself into the kitchen, reporting that she was starving, and tore into the Sunblest’s plastic wrapper and started stuffing soft doughy pieces of bread into her mouth. She was accompanied by a hollow-eyed, adenoidal girl – Lucy Lake, Roger and Sheila’s eldest offspring, who was in Maisie’s class at Park Place Primary. They both had the same neglected air about them with their unbrushed hair and unkempt uniforms. Mrs Macbeth couldn’t resist the urge to spit on a handkerchief and give Lucy Lake a quick rub.

‘We can have some of this salmon as well,’ Philippa said, dishing out plates and cutlery; ‘it needs eating up.’

Mrs McCue eyed the salmon doubtfully. The stuffed olive eye of the fish returned her gaze with a certain inscrutability.

‘Food poisoning,’ Mrs McCue whispered when Philippa turned her attention back to the soup pot. ‘It may as well have “salmonella” stamped on its forehead.’

‘Such a bonny word that,’ Mrs Macbeth said. ‘It would make a lovely name for a girl. Salmonella.’

‘Is that where the word comes from, from salmon?’ Maisie asked the room in general, and Philippa said, ‘No, it’s the name of the man who discovered it.’

‘Mr Salmon?’ Maisie said sceptically.

‘Do fish have foreheads?’ Mrs Macbeth puzzled.

‘Well, they have fingers,’ Lucy Lake smirked.

‘Really?’ Mrs Macbeth said, looking worried.

Maisie picked the small naked body of a shrimp off the salmon and scrutinized it. ‘What do shrimp eat?’ she asked speculatively. ‘Do you think they eat drowned people?’

‘We’ll make a philosopher of you yet,’ Philippa said brightly.

Maisie braved a shrimp, biting it in half delicately, and reported it ‘pure bowfing’. Mrs McCue said she couldn’t imagine what shrimp looked like swimming around in the sea and Lucy Lake said, ‘Like insects, probably.’ Philippa clapped her hands and said, ‘Stop it, before this goes any further,’ because everyone had begun to look rather sick.

Philippa took the new McFluffy from her smock pocket and looked at it quizzically. It did seem rather limp and lifeless. She gave it a little shake and it woke up with a start. Maisie took it from her mother and placed it on her shoulder and crooked her head so that it could nestle into her neck.

‘That looks very uncomfortable,’ Mrs Macbeth said.

‘It is,’ Maisie said, eating her soup awkwardly.

‘What’s this?’ Mrs Macbeth asked, poking at the manuscript on the table.

‘I’m writing a novel,’ Philippa said.

‘Why?’ Mrs Macbeth asked.

‘Why not? It’s a doctor/nurse romance, I’m going to send it to Mills & Boon. Archie thinks I’m prostituting my art, of course,’ Philippa said cheerfully (a common cry, it seemed), ‘but as far as I’m concerned that’s a specious argument based on the premise that all art is didactic in origin. Don’t you think?’ she said, turning to Mrs Macbeth.

‘Hmm,’ Mrs Macbeth said, shuffling through the manuscript. As a diversion from answering unanswerable questions she began to read out loud: ‘Flick’s cornflower blue eyes sparkled with devilment. Jake McCrindle may think he was better than she was because he was a high-flying house doctor and she was a mere first-year student nurse but she would soon show him—’ ‘Flick?’ Mrs Macbeth queried. ‘Flick? Are you sure?’

‘Isn’t Flick the name of a horse?’ Lucy Lake asked.

‘No, that’s Flicka,’ I told her. ‘My Friend Flicka.’

‘You have a friend called Flicka?’ Philippa asked, interested.

‘A-hem [or something like that],’ Mrs Macbeth said, ‘Flick had been on the men’s surgical ward only two days and already had clashed twice with the arrogant Dr McCrindle who seemed to think he was God’s gift both to St Vernon’s and to the nurses who worked there.’

‘Was there a St Vernon?’ asked Mrs McCue, who was contriving to knit and eat soup at the same time.

‘Perhaps you’re thinking of the football pools,’ Mrs Macbeth offered.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Philippa said dismissively, ‘it’s fiction.’

‘That was close,’ Mrs Macbeth said hoarsely, sinking back into her seat – as if a brush with death was part of her daily routine. She examined the fish bone. ‘A fish bone,’ she said, shaking her head in a mystified way. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘A fish?’ Lucy Lake (a sarcastic child) offered. The salmon was saying nothing. Mrs McCue gave Mrs Macbeth a cigarette to aid her recovery and lit one herself. ‘I’m saving for a Philips toaster,’ she said, ‘that’s a lot of cigarettes to smoke.’

A door closed and I heard water running upstairs. I wondered if this signalled the presence of Ferdinand somewhere in the house. I made my excuses and tip-toed up the litter-laden stairs. Sadly, the bathroom was empty of Ferdinand, although it did contain an unusual smell of male cleanliness – toothpaste, shaving foam and Lifebuoy soap – as if someone more used to regular institutional habits than the rest of the McCues had just vacated it. Beneath the smells of personal hygiene I could detect faint traces of Ferdinand’s own animal scent and if I listened closely I could almost hear the fading echo of his heartbeat.

The bathroom was a paean to sixties’ taste, from the sickly primrose yellow suite with transparent acrylic taps to the herringbone pine panelling which extended even to the ceiling where recessed lights glimmered darkly. There were mats of soapy hair in the plugholes and a deposit of slimy grey in the tub and another one of crusty brown in the toilet bowl, and an anaemic spider plant struggled for life on the windowsill, its leaves weighed down by a coating of talcum powder. The assorted reading matter of the different McCues was piled randomly on top of the cistern – Rubber Monthly, the Beano, and back issues of the Philosophical Quarterly.

Of Ferdinand himself, however, there was no sign. I looked in the upstairs rooms, hoped for his sleeping form in the spare bedroom where I had first encountered it, but could find nothing, only Mrs Macbeth’s old dog, Janet, asleep on the bed. She was snoring noisily, her breath rumbling loosely in her chest, but woke up when I sat on the bed and pushed her dry black nose into my hand. (‘Aye, she’s a wee bittie wabbit,’ Mrs Macbeth said mysteriously.)

I heard voices in the hall and peering over the banisters caught a glimpse of Ferdinand. Awake, he seemed more feral, with a hungry look about him as if he could happily eat raw meat and snap the spines of small animals if necessary. Unfortunately, he was just leaving the house, kissing Mrs McCue on the cheek and saying, ‘Bye, Gran.’

‘I’ll just give the kitchen a wee going round,’ Mrs Macbeth said, reaching for the Ajax.

‘Careful what you read,’ I advised her, retreating down the hallway as Mrs McCue tried to hoover me up.

We paused for the parting of our ways opposite this scene, outside the undertakers.

‘If only they’d bring the same enthusiasm to philosophical logic,’ Philippa said, bending down absently to allow Maisie to plant a goodbye kiss on her cheek. ‘They’re late,’ Philippa said fondly as we watched Maisie and Lucy Lake meander along Park Place back to school.

At the back of the Tower, where there was usually a constant ebb and flow of students, a logjam of bodies had built up. Some students were trying to get into the building so they could attend tutorials and lectures, while other students were intent on preventing them. I could see Heather wielding a placard which read SAY NO TO FASCISM!

A burly rugby player, with whom Andrea had once spent a hectic night, shouldered his way through the narrow passage that linked the Students’ Union to the Tower and amid much scuffling and cries of ‘Scab!’ managed to gain access to the building and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, held open a passage for others.

‘Well, goodbye,’ Philippa said, giving me an encouraging pat on the back that nearly knocked me over. She mounted the bike and wobbled precariously for several yards before attaining a kind of equilibrium along Small’s Wynd and disappearing.

I hurried along the Red Sea passage before the waters closed over it again.

‘Thanks,’ I said hastily to the rugby player, just as Heather jumped on his back with a kind of Sioux warrior scream and started biting his ear.

‘The only way a woman can gain the respect or even the attention of the male protagonist is when she proves herself to be possessed of an absolute, childlike innocence . . .’ Maggie Mackenzie was striding up and down at the front of the lecture theatre like a restless zoo animal, her hair already living a life of its own. ‘. . . a regression which, as in the case of Clarissa, for example, takes the extreme form of death . . .’

‘What’s she talking about?’ Andrea whispered to me. I shrugged incomprehension. I’d been under the misapprehension that Maggie Mackenzie was going to be lecturing on Middlemarch, otherwise I would never have come.

‘I thought she was going to be talking about Middlemarch,’ Andrea hissed.

‘Maybe she is talking about it and we just can’t tell.’

Andrea was looking very prim in a Laura Ashley fantasy milkmaid ensemble that Marie Antoinette would have coveted. You couldn’t tell that she had been thrashing around in paroxysms of lust just a few hours previously. (‘Again?’ an amazed Bob said as we tried to sleep between our purple passion-free sheets.)

‘How is death a regression?’ Kevin whispered in my other ear. ‘I don’t understand.’ I was the meat in a Kevin and Andrea sandwich in the back row of the lecture theatre, where assorted loafers usually slept out the hour.

‘I don’t know.’

I reached in my pocket for a tissue. I definitely had a cold coming on, if not worse, but instead of a tissue I again found a crumpled-up piece of paper, which after some puzzling I recognized as yet another stray page of The Expanding Prism of J. How were they getting there? Was someone putting them in my pocket? Or maybe they were sticky, like flypaper.

J, I noticed, was still as paranoid as ever and seemed to have become entangled with some kind of angry mythical beast (a common enough occurrence, it was beginning to seem) – Snorting, snorting, and dire snuffling of something ponderous and male, the beast of his imagination made manifest in muscle and sinew and arching frame, scaled like the sinful snake, the blood-lust of ages in the great thrust of the –

I supposed the angry mythical beast was an allegory or a metaphor but who knows – perhaps it was real, in as much as fiction is real, which it must be because it exists, unless something can exist without being real. And even if it only exists in the form of words, words themselves must exist or we wouldn’t be able to use them and Wittgenstein himself—

‘Miss Andrews?’ Maggie Mackenzie was climbing up and down the stairs looking for bad behaviour. ‘I don’t think you can afford to daydream, do you?’

Terri sidled into the lecture theatre. She was dressed in black fingerless gloves and a disintegrating taffeta cape and looked as if she’d been recently exhumed. From the look on her face I guessed she had not saved the goat last night. She was abruptly directed by Maggie Mackenzie to sit on the front row, ‘So I can make sure you stay awake,’ obviously unaware that Terri could sleep with her eyes open. Olivia, a natural front-row student, lent Terri pen and paper (which was never used) before returning to her assiduous note-taking.

‘Roland Barthes,’ Maggie Mackenzie, ‘says—’

‘Not him again,’ Andrea sighed. A faint cry of distress went up from the heart of the student body, indicating the presence of Proteus. Kara was sitting on the far side of the lecture theatre, well away from the source of the cry. She was dressed in a rainbow-striped jumper that looked as if it had been crocheted for a gorilla by a gorilla.

‘—claims that the classical narrative is based on the male Oedipal drama . . .’

Andrea leant across me and asked, ‘Is that what Edrakonia’s based on, Kevin?’ presumably out of mischief rather than genuine curiosity.

Kevin rolled his eyes like a cow in an abattoir and said, ‘Don’t be stupid,’ quite loudly, so that some people turned to stare, including Maggie Mackenzie, who tapped an impatient foot and said, in the words of teachers everywhere, ‘Do you have something you would like to share with us, Mr Riley?’ and then carried on without waiting for an answer –

‘As Althusser says, we are all “inside” ideology . . .’

‘What’s she talking about?’ Andrea muttered.

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Stop asking me questions.’ I could feel the beginnings of a headache.

Janice Rand was sitting in front of us with her balding Christian friend. I had to suppress the desire to flick things at them. They occasionally passed notes to each other on tightly folded little pieces of paper.

‘Freud . . . believing that women were less powerful because they know themselves to be castrated . . .’

‘Come again?’ Andrea said, looking alarmed.

‘. . . and also possessed of a less developed superego.’

Janice and her friend were passing notes furiously to each other. I managed to read one that said. ‘What’s a superego?’ Written down, it looked very odd, like a sauce for spaghetti or a musical tempo mark – spiritoso, sforzando, superego. My headache was growing worse. I wished I had an Anadin (a rather poetic cry of pain). I was too tired to concentrate.

‘Of course,’ Kevin said, to no-one in particular, ‘research has shown that ten minutes is the absolute limit of anyone’s concentration span, so the last twenty-five minutes have been pointless.’

‘Mr Riley? Something to contribute?’ Maggie Mackenzie said harshly. Kevin slid down in his seat and tried to look as if he was deaf and dumb.

‘The passive heroine in the phallic-centred myth . . .’

I inadvertently started daydreaming about Ferdinand. I made a mental list of what I knew about him – he was kind to old ladies, he slept like the dead, he might have blue eyes (I still hadn’t caught a glimpse of them), he was a convicted criminal. I was having trouble forming a whole character from these bits and pieces.

Andrea was doodling strange magic symbols on her jotter – fylfots, Ing runes, caducei and so on. Perhaps it was homework her Forfar wizard had set her. Janice caught sight of the swastika-like fylfot and was so startled by it that she could remain mute no more and started chattering eagerly to her Christian friend about Andrea being ‘a Nazi’.

Kevin, surreptitiously eating a banana, turned to me and, nodding in Maggie’s direction, mumbled, ‘Is she actually going to talk about George Eliot, do you think?’

An exasperated Maggie Mackenzie threw the blackboard eraser in the general direction of the back of the lecture theatre. It caught Janice a glancing blow on the temple and she screamed in an outraged martyr way.

‘No, I don’t think she is.’

Janice’s scream set off Proteus, who embarked on a desperate kind of wailing as if he was about to fall over the edge of the world (well, who knows what babies think) and Kara had to make her way along a row of people like an annoying late theatregoer – ‘Sorry, excuse me, sorry’ – until she reached her infant. ‘Nappy,’ she announced to everyone.

‘I think I’m going to faint,’ Andrea murmured.

Kara wandered out of the lecture theatre. She smelt earthy as if she’d just been dug up. Her long lank hair was corralled in a headscarf and she was wearing black wellingtons and a cotton dirndl skirt and had a streak of mud – or worse – on her cheek. She had the musty, unappetizing scent of chicken feed and camomile flowers on her.

‘Don’t forget your baby,’ I reminded her, although you wouldn’t think you could, would you? Nor should you.

Terri caught up with me and said she was going to go and find Chick and ask him what he’d done with the yellow dog. She was followed out of the lecture theatre by Olivia, warily side-stepping Kevin with whom Andrea was still wrestling over the illogic of Edrakonia. ‘But if the dragons are immortal and Griddlebart isn’t, why don’t they just wait until he dies and then take over again?’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Why?’

‘Because,’ Kevin said loudly as if Andrea was deaf, ‘it’s a matter of honour, not simple expediency. Honour amongst dragons is—’

‘Do you want a coffee?’ Olivia said to me. She was wearing a high-necked velvet dress that had little velvet-covered buttons that ran from throat to hem so that if you’d wanted to split her open you would have had a handy score mark to follow. She looked pale and otherworldly, like someone who usually lived in a ballad and was expecting to be accidentally locked in a kist on her wedding-day or abandon her goosefeather mattresses and run away with a band of gypsies—

‘Effie?’

‘Yeah, right, coffee—’ but we’d failed to notice the bulky advance of Maggie Mackenzie until it was too late. Terri said, ‘Got to see a man about a dog,’ and disappeared with commendable alacrity.

‘George Eliot?’ Maggie barked at me like a sergeant-major.

‘Nearly finished,’ I lied.

‘Don’t lie, Miss Andrews. Where is it?’ I gestured vaguely towards the world outside the walls of the English department, indicating that my George Eliot might have been working away in the library or playing table football in the Union.

‘Come with me,’ she said peremptorily and turned on her heel and raced off towards the lift so that I had to run to keep up with her.

‘Later,’ I gasped to Olivia. In the lift itself there was barely enough room for the two of us and I tried to shrink myself into a corner to avoid having to breathe in Maggie Mackenzie’s inky scent.

I followed her into her room, where she paraded up and down her crowded bookshelves, swiftly pulling out books here and there and handing them to me, a Casebook series on Middlemarch, a Literature in Perspective on George Eliot. ‘These are not difficult books,’ she said, ‘they won’t task your brain too much.’ She made a visible effort to be encouraging. ‘You have to try, you’re wasting your life.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said without any conviction.

‘You haven’t produced a single piece of work all term,’ she said harshly. Maggie Mackenzie was one of those people who believe that there’s nothing in the world that can’t be done with the application of a little effort. (I suppose she was right.) I glanced down and noticed that the hem of my recycled-sari skirt was loose and torn, some of the little mirrors on it hanging by a thread. I was so clearly a girl who was never going to get her homework in on time.

‘You hardly ever show your face in tutorials,’ she continued. ‘It’s all very well enjoying yourself now, but in twenty years’ time—’

A ragged and uncoordinated chant had started up outside:

‘What do we want?’

‘Peace!’

‘When do we want it?’

‘Now!’

‘It’s beginning,’ Maggie said with some satisfaction.

‘What is?’

‘The end.’

I expected I was going to grow old and die, or, if I was unlucky, just die, but I didn’t say that to her because it wasn’t what she wanted to hear and instead I mumbled something inarticulate and she grabbed the nearest missile she could lay her hands on – a copy of Cranford, although I don’t think the choice of book was significant – and threw it across the room at me. Her aim was, as usual, poor, the throw executed more in exasperation than aggression, and Cranford hit the back wall of her room, dislodging a rather frightening Frida Kahlo print. If it had been Philippa McCue throwing she would have hit me smack between the eyes and then caught the rebound off Frida.

‘I want that essay on my desk at ten o’clock on Friday,’ Maggie Mackenzie said sharply, ‘or else. You’ll thank me for this later, you know.’

I doubted that I would, but I kept quiet as there was no point in antagonizing her further, and at least she seemed to be giving some thought to my future which was more than anyone else was, including myself.

As I hurried away I heard an odd lowing sound coming from Martha Sewell’s room. I paused to listen and detected more animal noises, followed by some distressed sobbing. I hesitated outside her door, and then knocked.

It was opened by Jay Sewell. Behind him I could see Martha sitting at her desk. She was wearing a grey poncho that seemed to have been made out of felted squirrel fur and was holding her hand to her forehead in an attitude of despairing grief.

‘We lost Buddy,’ Jay explained.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said politely. Buddy had been sick a couple of days ago and now he was dead. It seemed a rather sudden demise. I still didn’t understand who Buddy was, of course.

‘We have no children of our own,’ Jay said, tears welling up in his eyes, ‘and Buddy was like a son to us.’ I didn’t really want to be this intimate with the Sewells and the sight of a distraught Martha, not hitherto prone to any emotion at all, was unnerving. Jay had somehow manoeuvred me into the room by now and at the sight of me Martha started sobbing even more. I put out a reluctant hand and patted her on the shoulder and said solicitously, ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’

She stood up suddenly, knocking me to one side, and shrieked at her husband, ‘We have to find him, we have to find Buddy.’

‘He’s not dead, then?’ I asked cautiously.

Martha looked at me in horror. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘What does Buddy look like?’ I said hastily. ‘Maybe I’ve seen him.’

‘He’s very handsome,’ Jay said.

‘And he has beautiful blue eyes,’ Martha added, calming down a bit and dabbing delicately at her nose with a tissue.

‘Well, green, really,’ Jay corrected gently.

‘Nonsense,’ Martha said, ‘they aren’t green. Perhaps a hint of green,’ she conceded. ‘Aqua might be a more accurate word. I could compromise on aqua.’

Jay didn’t seem willing to compromise. ‘Not aqua exactly,’ he said frowning, ‘cerulean maybe.’

‘Cyan,’ Martha offered, like a bridge player making a last, rather outrageous, bid.

‘Cyan?’ Jay said contemplatively. ‘How about glaucous?’ Whoever Buddy was, he was going to have crumbled into dust before Jay and Martha managed to decide on the colour of his eyes.

‘Let’s just say bluey-green, shall we?’ I suggested helpfully.

‘Greeny-blue,’ Jay Sewell said, making a final stand.

Professor Cousins put his head round the door. ‘I heard a commotion. Is there anything I can do?’ He caught sight of me and smiled and said, ‘I would introduce you, but I can’t remember your name.’ He laughed at Jay. ‘I can’t even remember my own name, let alone hers.’

‘Cousins,’ Jay said seriously, ‘your name is Cousins.’

‘I was joking,’ Professor Cousins said, somewhat abashed.

‘They’ve lost Buddy,’ I explained. ‘He’s like a son to them. And he has bluey-green, greeny-blue eyes.’

‘And a gorgeous coat,’ Martha said.

‘A Crombie? I had a Crombie once,’ Professor Cousins said nostalgically. ‘It was gorgeous.’

Martha wasn’t listening, she was growing lyrical. ‘It was like melted milk chocolate. We almost called him Hershey,’ she added sadly.

‘Really?’ Professor Cousins said politely.

‘A little light-hearted fun,’ Jay said solemnly.

‘You could ask the Salvation Army,’ Professor Cousins said. ‘I’m told they’re very good with missing persons.’

Jay and Martha turned to look at him. ‘Buddy’s a dog [or dorg],’ Jay said carefully.

‘A pedigree Weimaraner,’ Martha elaborated.

‘Weimaraner,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘as in Weimar Republic?’

‘I’ve got an essay to do,’ I said, beating a quiet retreat.

‘Keep an eye out for Buddy,’ Jay shouted after me and I heard Professor Cousins murmur, ‘Oh, what a horrible idea,’ as I shut the door behind me.