Colin Dexter - The Daughters of Cain

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Extract from A Cornishman at Oxford© A. L. Rowse;

Extract from The Lesson by Roger McGough, reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop Group Ltd;

Extracts by Cyril Connolly reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Cyril Connolly c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN, ©1944 Cyril Connolly;

Extract from The Observer© by Oliver Sacks, 9 January 1994;

Faber & Faber Ltd for the extract from New Year Letter by W. H. Auden;

Extract from Oxford by Jan Morris, published by permission of Oxford University Press;

Extract from Back to Methuselah granted by The Society of Authors on behalf of the Bernard Shaw Estate;

Extract from The Pitt Rivers Museum, A Souvenir Guide to the Collections © Pitt Rivers Museum 1993;

Extract from The Pitt Rivers Museum taken from The Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968–1983, James Fenton, published by Penguin © 1982;

Kate Champkin for the extracts from The Sleeping Life of Aspern Williams by Peter Champkin;

N. F. Simpson for the extract from One-Way Pendulum ;

Extract from Berlioz, Romantic and Classic by Ernest Newman published by Dover Publications;

Extract from The Times by Matthew Parris, published 7 March 1994;

Extract from Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russell, published by permission of Routledge (Unwin Hyman);

Extracts from The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary , published by permission of Oxford University Press;

Faber & Faber Ltd for the extract from ‘La Figlia Che Piange’ in Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot.

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On Mondays to Fridays it was fifty-fifty whether the postman called before Julia Stevens left for school.

So, at 8.15 a.m. on 25 May she lingered awhile at the dark blue front door of her two-bedroomed terraced house in East Oxford. No sign of her postman yet; but he’d be bringing something a bit later.

Occasionally she wondered whether she still felt just a little love for the ex-husband she’d sued for divorce eight years previously for reasons of manifold infidelity. Especially had she so wondered when, exactly a year ago now, he’d sent her that card — a large, tasteless, red-rosed affair — which in a sad sort of way had pleased her more than she’d wanted to admit. Particularly those few words he’d written inside: ‘Don’t forget we had some good times too!’

If anyone, perhaps, shouldn’t she tell him ?

Then there was Brenda: dear, precious, indispensable Brenda. So there would certainly be one envelope lying on the ‘Welcome’ doormat when she returned from school that afternoon.

Aged forty-six (today) the Titian-haired Julia Stevens would have been happier with life (though only a little) had she been able to tell herself that after nearly twenty-three years she was still enjoying her chosen profession. But she wasn’t; and she knew that she would soon have packed it all in anyway, even if…

Even if…

But she put that thought to the back of her mind.

It wasn’t so much the pupils — her thirteen- to eighteen-year-olds — though some of them would surely have ruffled the calm of a Mother Teresa. No. It wasn’t that. It was the way the system was going: curriculum development, aims and objectives (whatever the difference between those was supposed to be!), assessment criteria, pastoral care, parent consultation, profiling, testing… God! When was there any time for teaching these days?

She’d made her own views clear, quite bravely so, at one of the staff meetings earlier that year. But the Head had paid little attention. Why should he? After all, he’d been appointed precisely because of his cocky conversance with curriculum development, aims and objectives and the rest… A young, shining ideas-man, who during his brief spell of teaching (as rumour had it) would have experienced considerable difficulty in maintaining discipline even amongst the glorious company of the angels.

There was a sad little smile on Julia’s pale face as she fished her Freedom Ticket from her handbag and stepped on to the red Oxford City double-decker.

Still, there was one good thing. No one at school knew of her birthday. Certainly, she trusted, none of the pupils did, although she sensed a slight reddening under her high cheekbones as just for a few seconds she contemplated her embarrassment if one of her classes broke out into ‘Happy Birthday, Mrs Stevens!’ She no longer had much confidence in the powers of the Almighty; but she almost felt herself praying.

But if she were going to target any prayer, she could surely so easily find a better aim (or was it an ‘objective’?) than averting a cacophonic chorus from 5C, for example. And in any case, 5C weren’t all that bad, really; and she, Julia Stevens, mirabile dictu , was one of the few members of staff who could handle that motley and unruly crowd. No. If she were going to pray for anything, it would be for something that was of far greater importance.

Of far greater importance for herself…

As things turned out, her anxieties proved wholly groundless. She received no birthday greetings from a single soul, either in the staff-room or in any of the six classes she taught that day.

Yet there was, in 5C, just the one pupil who knew Mrs Stevens’ birthday. Knew it well, for it was the same as his own: the twenty-fifth of May. Was it that strange coincidence that had caused them all the trouble?

Trouble? Oh, yes!

In the previous Sunday Mirror ’s horoscope column, Kevin Costyn had scanned his personal ‘Key to Destiny’ with considerable interest:

Now that the lone planet voyages across your next romance chart, you swop false hope for thrilling fact. Maximum mental energy helps you through to a hard-to-reach person who is always close to your heart. Play it cool.

‘Maximum mental energy’ had never been Kevin’s strong point. But if such mighty exertion were required to win his way through to such a person, well, for once he’d put his mind to things. At the very least, it would be an improvement on the ‘brute-force-and-ignorance’ approach he’d employed on that earlier occasion — when he’d tried to make amorous advances to one of his school-mistresses.

When he’d tried to rape Mrs Julia Stevens.

At the age of seventeen (today) Kevin Costyn was the dominant personality amongst the twenty-four pupils, of both sexes, comprising Form 5C at the Proctor Memorial School in East Oxford. He was fourteen months or so above the average age of his class because he was significantly below the average Intelligence Quotient for his year, as measured by orthodox psychometric criteria.