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.Not that he disapproved of me quite the opposite.Thanks to Dad'sgood friends at the Foundation, I was the academic equivalent of a World War II food parcel, come tolend a little milk and honey to a resource-starved project.I was a gift-wrapped donation from thewonderful world of private enterprise, of a kind that the British government had apparently instructed alluniversity departments to seek out, but that very few of them seemed to be able to find.In his ownscrupulously polite and ever-so-slightly downcast fashion he made me very welcome.'I can't promise you fame and fortune, he told me. Nor can I promise you that the journals will beenthusiastic to publish the results of your research.Mere mention of the word psychotropic is enough Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlto set all their alarm bells ringing, I'm afraid.I can't even guarantee you a safe and routine passage to yourdoctorate.All I can promise you is that you'll be involved in some genuine research, exploring unchartedterritory.''That's what I want, I assured him, sincerely enough.'I hope that you don't find it too boring, he went on. The actual work isn't nearly as way out as itsounds.''I know the score, I told him. You have to get right down into the experimental gutter if you really wanta clear sight of the theoretical stars.''Precisely, he said, with a weak and watery grin.Later, when I tried to picture Viners playing sex games with Teresa in the mid-range CT room, itseemed too absurd to be possible.But absurdity and impossibility are two very different things.I had towonder whether, if Ihad caught the virus from Teresa, he might have caught it too, in exactly the sameundignified fashion.I even wondered whether it might have been the other way around whether hemight have infected her.Later, though, I found it very difficult even to begin to imagine Viners beingdriven by the hunger.If he'd ever suffered any symptoms at all, I decided, when things first began to lookreally bad, he couldn't have looked at me the way he did when I confessed my fears to him.Hecouldn'thave.He was far too straight to carry off that kind of lie.That was Viners.Not dismal, exactly, butstraight.Even without Anne, England would have been okay, but Anne added that special extra ingredient.Looking back, I suppose I have to be suspicious even of the attraction I felt for her, but at the time itseemed to be perfectly innocent, uniquely pleasant and wholly good, and it probably was.It wassomething about which I never had a qualm of conscience, because it felt so natural.I never wanted tohurt her not for a moment.I only wanted to do her good, and I was utterly sincere in that intention.Iwon't call it love, and I certainly won't call it love at first sight, but it was never an act with Anne, the wayit always had been with other girls.I really did feel protective towards her, and gentle.It wasn't just aplan of campaign to persuade her to put out.I know she didn't see it that way not at first but that wasonly to be expected.If there was one thing I wanted more than anything else it was to persuade her thatmy feelings were authentic, that my intentions were honourable.That's why the insinuations of that slimy detective were so vilely insulting.Okay, I will say it.Why shouldn't I? I loved Anne.Not at first.At first I just thought she looked cute:frail and lonely and helpless and luminously pretty.But in time, as I tried harder to draw her closer to me,to break down the wall of her anxiety and restore her wounded self-esteem, I began to love her.I nevertold her so, but that was because it was true, not because it wasn't.I could have said it easily enough if ithad been a lie, a move, a stratagem, but it's not so easy to say something like that when you have toweigh the meaning very carefully, when you want to be absolutely accurate.Whether I said it or not, itwas true.I loved Anne.Not at the beginning, but certainly in the end before everything blew up in myface.Our first meeting was an awkward one, pregnant with embarrassment on both sides.Our firstconversation was almost monosyllabic I think it took me nearly half an hour to wring a completesentence out of her.I just couldn't find a way to get her involved, and I was so desperate that I made acouple of real foot-in-mouth blunders.I actually asked her whether she was anorexic, and had to watchher face set hard in response.Of course she was anorexic it stuck out a mile but the last thing I Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlshould have done was accuse her of it.It made it so much harder, later, to try to ease her out of it.She was a little crazy, too.No, not crazy just very, very nervous.That was only to be expected, Iguess, given that she was away from home for the very first time, and given that her home seemed tohave been a real oasis of calm in a troubled world the kind of safe haven that a home is supposed to beand almost never is.From what she told me I gathered that her parents were every bit as ambitious forher as Dad was for me, but their tactics couldn't have been more different layer upon layer of kid glove,and never a single lecture on how tough you have to be to get by in a tough world.Anne wasn't tough.Neither was I, really, but I was every bit as tough as Dad could make me.But Anne's wasn't just theordinary, expectable nervousness.It cut deeper than that.Nor was her anorexia the only symptom.How many neurotic habits and rituals she'd accumulated I couldn't really say, because she never let meclose enough to observe them all, even after she let me into her bed.But there was one that was plainenough for all the world to see.She had this weird way of clutching at her own neck, worrying andscratching it with her fingernails.I'm not sure that she was even aware that she was doing it.Once ortwice when I actually reached out and pulled her hand away she looked far more surprised than annoyed.She had a permanent mark on the side of her throat, which looked a little like a lovebite, though itobviously wasn't.Sometimes it faded a little, but she was always picking at it.Once, I made her look at the mark in a mirror. You've got to let it heal, Anne, I told her. Hell, it couldget infected.''It's nothing, she told me, flatly. Nothing at all.''People are going to think I did it, I said, hoping that if I could make a joke out of it I might somehowcrack the neurotic impulse behind it.'So what? she said. It's nothing.It doesn't hurt.'She lived on the far side of the campus, in what I thought of as the old part, though the Hall she lived inwas as modern as the others of its kind.Her department still retained certain traditional echoes of thetheological college which was one of the ancestors of the modern university, and was housed in the worstbuilding on campus an ugly, dilapidated thing whose grounds were infested with rats.It was regardedwith the kind of unquestioning reverence people usually give to things that are old, but in my opinion itwas the kind of place which ought to have been pulled down so that something functional could be put upin its place
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