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it over with. Acquaint her with the fact that, in certain circles – specifically the liberal feminist circles in which he had sought to find love in the past – admitting you were at St Wino’s was like confessing to some dreadful disease.
    Isabel was staring at the carving above the gates, the painted shields, mythic beasts, portcullises and roses. ‘What a wonderful place,’ she murmured.
    Olly shifted from foot to foot, hoping that if he said nothing she would lose interest and move on. Apart from anything else her backpack was dragging at his shoulders and it was hot.
    But Isabel stood, it seemed, spellbound. He watched her wide, clear eyes take in the details of the façade.
    Then the wide eyes narrowed and looked puzzled. ‘What’s he doing?’ Isabel asked. She was pointing at the carved central lozenge of the college’s eponymous saint.
    Olly cleared his throat. ‘Um, he’s holding a palm in one hand. It’s the traditional symbol of martyrdom.’
    Isabel glanced at him in mild exasperation. ‘Well of course I know that, ’ she said. ‘It’s the other hand I’m wondering about.’
    Olly took a deep breath. The fact that St Alwine appeared to be holding a bottle had contributed in no small part to the college nickname. There were those who insisted the long-necked, bulbous object being held in the saint’s carved fingers was a cosh by which the generally mysterious Alwine might have met his end. But they had always been a minority and a mocked one at that.
    ‘It’s some sort of club.’ Olly raised his chin as he spoke, as if to deflect objection.
    Isabel continued to look thoughtfully at the carving. ‘It looks like a bottle,’ she pronounced at last. She turned to him, eyes sparkling with amusement. ‘What’s this college called?’
    ‘Saint, um, Alwine’s.’
    ‘How funny. St Alwine’s, and he’s holding a wine bottle.’
    ‘A cosh,’ Olly corrected, determinedly. He was now quite set on his course of non-disclosure. If she didn’t know – yet – of his alma mater’s reputation within the university, then why tell her? Did he really want her to associate him with a group of braying, champagne-swilling, window-smashing, cash-flashing toffs of the most objectionable kind?
    Thankfully, Isabel had switched her attention to the statue outside the gate, of a man in a ruff, looking down at his open hand. Olly fell on the opportunity to transmit the relatively uncontroversial information concerning it; this, he told her, was the Elizabethan founder of the college, Sir Titus Alwyne, known as Texting Titus because his pose suggested someone sending a cell-phone message. Sometimes, he added, Titus would contemplate a pizza box or a can of Heineken, strategically placed there by an inebriate.
    He had to stop himself adding that during Caspar De Borchy’s reign at the Bullinger helm, Titus’s dignity had been further compromised by bras and suspenders. Or adding that Caspar had made tearing up fifty-pound notes in front of homeless people one of the club’s initiation rites.
    But Caspar De Borchy was gone now. Although Olly had heard he had a younger brother coming up this term. It crossed Olly’s mind that he should warn Isabel to give De Borchy minor a wide berth, but he dismissed it as unnecessary. Given the fact she was at Branston and terribly conscientious there was absolutely no chance of them ever meeting. Caspar was as snobbish as he was lazy and his brother was bound to be the same. If not worse.
    They were crossing the river now.
    ‘Is punting hard?’ Isabel asked, glancing over at the flat-bottomed boats, propelled by long poles, which plied up and down the river.
    ‘That depends,’ Olly said evasively. Throughout his college career he had struggled to master the art of balancing on the boat’s slippery rear and been consistently unable to remember which bits of the river were shallow and which deep, squidgy and likely to retain the pole – and him with it – if he pushed