Free The Summer Isles by Ian R. MacLeod

about their lives to notice. The drive to a dark clearing in a wood, the cold barrel to the forehead…
    As I make my way down Holywell to the Bodleian Library past the old city walls, the clouds in the west begin to thin. The wind picks and plays with rents of blue sky, dragging them out through the tangled grey like skeins of wool. The sun flickers. The streets and the rooftops gleam as if freshly varnished. The air suddenly feels warm. Steam begins to rise.
    The Bodleian’s open until eight now in the summer. There are none of those funny and unpredictable half days—another advantage of living in Modernist Britain. The light brightens, the steam thickens. I dawdle along the narrow, unpredictable streets that wind around the backs of the colleges and give alternate glimpses of kitchen dustbins and Wren towers. I seem to be moving in a land of ghosts. A plump cat smiles at me before disappearing into the snapdragon and ivy along a wall. A woman with a face like the Queen of Hearts is shrieking from an open upstairs window over a brassy avalanche of pealing bells. For all that I can tell, she might be yelling, No! No! Sentence first — verdict afterwards.
    But Oxford. Oxford! All the years that I longed to see myself like this, on my way to the Bodleian—the very picture of academic greatness! It was something that occupied me even when my mother was still alive and I was working on a much earlier draft of my book. Although I’d never actually been to Oxford then, I knew it as some far-off Avalon, all myths, rumours and dreaming spires. I saw the quads and the beautiful buildings, the books, the whispering corridors of learning, the bat-like dons, the twin shining rivers. Graceful and free of care, I wandered in my imaginings with the chosen few as we talked and disported ourselves in the fragrant clouds of this academic heaven.
    In those days, the real Oxford was almost entirely a male enclave. In my daydreams, it remained exclusively so. For I admit there was a twinge of the erotic to my yearnings. I suppose that in part it was the unmentionably controversial ghost of Oscar Wilde. I knew, by repute, of the trial concerning his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, although I couldn’t imagine that they had actually done anything together. Apart from the Ancient Greeks, who were almost mythical anyway, I couldn’t believe that any two men had ever really grappled with each other sexually. Still, by some odd personal antennae I picked up an aura about Oxford that was far from incorrect. Of course the great, gay, decadent days of the twenties and early thirties were still to come, with a generation of promising poets like Rowse, Waugh, Green, Auden, Sitwell, MacNeice and Betjeman whom I followed when I eventually subscribed to publications like Outlook waiting in the wings. Now—all lost, mad, emigrated, imprisoned, dead by so-called suicide—they are said to have been deviant to a man, and their names are excised from the University records.
    Long before that, working each evening after school in the front parlour of our house as my mother nodded over her knitting in her chair behind me, I knew that I was still an impossibly long way from Oxford. But nourishing my one great work, I never even bothered to think of setting some more realistic target and perhaps submitting an essay on local history to the Lichfield Mercury or Staffordshire Life. It was all or nothing—and perhaps in my heart of hearts I was happy enough with nothing. I worked at that table by the window after teaching the rudiments of English and History to classrooms full of lads whom I passed in the street seemingly moments later and with a wife and a pram in tow. As easily as some faintly flavoured and not entirely disagreeable medicine, my whole life was already slipping by.
    One evening, I remember, the work at the parlour table was going particularly well. A chapter on Metternich that I’d written twice before suddenly came into bright