Читать книгу The Meadows of the Moon - James Hilton - Страница 9

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He went up to Oxford when he was eighteen. Fran was lonely at Sky Peals without him; she did not know what to do with her time. John wanted her to come to the tannery and take up a business career, but the prospect did not attract her; she preferred, in the end, to attach herself to a women’s college in London and take courses in history and economics. About this time also there came news that her grandfather, Alvarez Cordeiro, had died in Peru, and had left her all he had—amounting in value to between ten and fifteen thousand pounds.

She saw Michael only during vacations and at the occasional week-ends when she visited him in Oxford during term-time. She found him there the centre of a literary and artistic coterie whose chief occupation seemed to be mutual admiration and the talking of vast quantities of semi-brilliant nonsense. Michael held his own with ease in such society, for semi-brilliant nonsense came to his lips (and always had come) from an apparently quenchless spring within. She never liked him very much during those week-ends at Oxford. She always felt: These other people make him silly.... She was certain, at all events, that they were making him waste his time and neglect even the most obligatory of studies.

And yet she knew, secretly, that she did like him. She never had doubts, but she often had difficulties. Always, for instance, when she met him first after an absence (whether at Oxford or at Sky Peals) her immediate thought was: “What did I see in you, Micky, that used to make me like you so much?” And then, an hour or a day or a week afterwards, when they were alone together at some odd moment, she would suddenly feel, with a curious inside comfort, “Ah, that, Micky, that’s what I like you for.” And that, the essence of him, was elusive and unanalyzable. All she could discern was that it was something rather childlike.

Everybody at Oxford seemed to think that a brilliant “First” would fall to him as a matter of course. It came, therefore, as a shock when he failed altogether in his final examinations.