Free Wrote For Luck by D.J. Taylor

there?’
    ‘I shouldn’t wonder. Clive will probably want me to project-manage it. Do you mind?’
    ‘Why should I mind?’
    ‘It will probably mean waiting a bit on the house.’
    Lucy had seen this coming. ‘How long?’
    ‘Well, two or three months. The spring, maybe. Prices may even have fallen a bit by then.’ He picked up one of the magazines. ‘You can do most things from Azerbaijan these days, but I don’t think buying a house is one of them.’
    Lucy was surprised by the sense of loss that this brought, surreptitiously, into view. The Allardyces’ lawn; the child’s white face at the window; the thought that you shouldn’t be expected to put up with this degree of obtuseness from someone you loved; all these thoughts briefly but inconclusively contended in her head.
    There was silence for a moment. Lucy fell asleep almost immediately, woke up for a second or two to see Mark brooding over a book called
Managing the Blur: Corporate Life in the Connected Economy
. She went back to sleep thinking of the little woman in the house in north Oxford whose book onthe Gawain poet, she reflected, might have sold five hundred copies, Henrietta’s placid face under the light, a feeling that could have been contempt, or envy, or some quite different emotion lost now amid the coffee cups and the darkling south London lawn.
     
    —2001

 
    A t some point in the remote past somebody had dropped a bottle of ink on the lip of the rush-mat carpeting. Over the years the stain had faded from light-blue to cobalt, finally to an indeterminate shade of grey. He would have missed it had it not been there. The secretary, who had shuffled the sheets of paper on her desk three times and pretended to read them twice, said, exaggeratedly, ‘The Headmaster will see you now, Mr Crowther,’ like someone impersonating a secretary in a
Carry On
film, and he stood up and put the copy of the Old Boys’ newsletter, with its picture of the rugby team touring New Zealand, back on the circular table. Like the headmaster, the secretary was new, and had been heard to say that the fifty-yard walk to the noticeboards was an imposition. The boys, shrewd in these matters, had already nicknamed her ‘Ma Baboon’.
    The path to the headmaster’s study lay across a tiled passage, sealed off at one end by locked double doors. Here there was a view out of the window into the Cathedral Close and several portraits of evil-looking old men in clerical robes. He wondered how many times he had taken this journey. Two hundred? Three? Routine made you unobservant, less vigilant of the nets that might be thrown out to pinion you. He pressed on into the study, past the gas-fire that sometimes worked if you kicked it in the right place and towards the immense oblongdesk where the new headmaster sat making desultory remarks into a telephone. ‘A child-focused paradigm,’ Crowther heard him correct his caller, ‘irrespective of the core competencies.’
    The new headmaster was short and stout and had the vestiges of a West Midlands accent. However, he had stopped saying ‘righty ho’, which showed a conciliating spirit. When he saw Crowther he waved excitedly, put down the telephone and said, in a single, unpunctuated stream of words: ‘Very good of you to come and see me won’t you take a chair great deal to discuss.’
    Crowther took his chair, which was the one that slumped alarmingly to the left, and found himself marking the changes that had been effected since his last visit in the summer. The engraving of the Wensum at Pull’s Ferry was still there and the view of the city from the high ground, but the drawing of the chapel had made way for a photo of what looked the debauched aftermath of the Chelsea Arts Club ball, but turned out to have been taken at the last meeting of the Headmasters’ Conference.
    ‘Very good of you,’ the new headmaster said again. Crowther resolved to concentrate more thoroughly, so that if anything was said with