The knock on the door was rapid, peremptory. Before I could answer, it opened and a tanned, silver-haired man entered. His expensive suit fitted him perfectly. You got the impression that at the end of the day he didn’t undress; he just shed it like a second skin. He glanced around the office. Oak-panelled and much subdivided, it was taller than it was wide and crammed with spare desks. Mine was the only desk that was occupied. A bright autumn day had grown blustery and the walls were filled with the restless shadows of the chestnut trees in the avenue outside.

The man’s eyes settled on me. He gave me the most searching look I’ve ever received. It was as if we were in a science fiction film and he’d just aimed some kind of scanning device at me, then read on the display, Graduate student. Temporary contract. Easily intimidated.

‘Is this the Advisors of Studies’ office?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Lawrence Bell,’ he said. ‘I’m here with my daughter, Iona. We have an appointment with the Chief Advisor.’

My pulse quickened. The Chief Advisor was a senior lecturer from the Classics Department – patient, well meaning, but a stranger to such accessories as a diary or watch. I tried to keep track of his movements by writing down on scraps of paper any appointment he referred to – no matter how fleetingly – then assembling the scraps on my desk in date and time order. As far as I knew, right now he was attending a plenum of the University senate.

Normally, my first impulse would have been to sift through the scraps to double check, but I guessed that this wouldn’t prompt Lawrence Bell to revise his opinion of me upwards. Instead, I asked, ‘Oh, right. Er…when’s your appointment for?’

He stared at me in silence for a few more seconds. Then, with just enough emphasis to convey how redundant my question had been, he said, ‘Now.’

‘Okay. Well, if you’d like to take a seat I’ll…’

‘You mean he’s not here?’

‘Not right now. But if you can wait for a few moments…’

‘No. I’m not interested in waiting. If I were interested in waiting I’d have turned up without an appointment, wouldn’t I?’

I couldn’t really dispute the logic of this. But somehow, through a series of mumbled entreaties, I ushered him back out to the landing. There, on one of three seats arranged side by side, slouched a young woman, presumably his daughter. Fully extended, her slender legs stretched almost to the opposite wall. She was frowning, as if something written on the wall that only she could see offended her. She shifted in the seat and crossed her arms. Her whole posture bespoke absolute confidence in the beauty of her figure. I had to admit – with that sense of dismal acceptance familiar to gauche young men when confronted with the unattainable – that she was quite right. Health and prosperity rose from her like steam from a race-winning thoroughbred.

To my relief, before Lawrence Bell could share his grievance with her I saw Dr. Reed coming up the stairs. With his curly grey hair that seemed to be receding in a pattern all its own, he projected an air of hectic amiability that disarmed everyone he dealt with – not least because it prevented them from guessing just how astute he really was. Neither father nor daughter seemed impressed, however. Indeed they contemplated him with baleful indifference. Before I could make any introductions, Lawrence Bell said, ‘It’s about my daughter’s entry to Junior Honours.’

If Dr. Reed felt the same alarm as I had upon hearing this he didn’t show it. Indeed he reacted as if Lawrence Bell had just reminded him of a long anticipated social engagement.

‘Ah, yes. Excellent,’ he replied, rubbing his hands together. ‘Please take a seat in my office. I’ll be with you in just a moment.’

With the drawn out sigh of the perpetually afflicted, Lawrence Bell’s daughter rose and followed him into Dr. Reed’s tiny office, while I returned to mine.

A few moments later, Dr. Reed entered and began opening and closing the drawers of the filing cabinet at random, presumably looking for the girl’s UCAS form and other information.

‘Here, let me help,’ I said.

As I flicked through the maroon drop files, I asked, ‘So what’s happening with her?’

‘Oh, she’s a History of Art student. She failed her second year degree exams, then she missed the re-sits. Her father’s a QC. He’s here to insist that she gets another chance to take them.’

‘Isn’t that against regulations?’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘How did she miss the re-sits? Was she ill?’

‘No, no. He took her to South Africa for her twenty first birthday.’

Before I could say anything, he left. But then, a few moments later, he put his head back round the door.

‘You have customers,’ he said.

I opened the door fully. A stocky, fair-haired young man with glasses stood on the landing, closely flanked by his parents. His father was a balding, middle-aged version of him; his mother was more slender, with shoulder length grey hair. They were looking around them with such bewilderment you would imagine they’d had blindfolds removed only seconds before.

‘Can I help you?’ I asked, as gently as possible.

‘It’s our Michael,’ his father said. ‘He’s starting today at the Uni …’

‘But the folk over at the accommodation office say they’ve never heard of him,’ his mother continued. ‘They say there’s nowhere for him to stay. I mean he’s got his offer letter and all that. But they won’t help him.’

‘I’m really sorry about that,’ I replied. ‘Here, come on in and we’ll see what we can do to sort this out for you.’

As I ushered them into my office, I heard a raised voice coming from Dr. Reed’s office. I couldn’t make out what it was saying, but it resonated with authority. Its owner was clearly accustomed to stating his case.

Once I’d got Michael and his parents settled, I asked him about his background. He was from a mining town in the Black Country – coal and limestone – which had been ravaged in the Eighties and was now criticised for looking so dishevelled. His father was a panel beater, his mother worked part-time in a café. He had worked double shifts all summer, stacking shelves in the local supermarket to make enough extra money to afford a place in halls of residence.

‘So I won’t miss out on stuff,’ he said, with a shy smile.

He had the right paperwork with him and had already matriculated, so it clearly wasn’t his fault. Yet he and his parents remained hesitant in their words and gestures. There was a shadow of diffidence upon them, as if they expected to be told – all evidence to the contrary – that they were at fault. This cautious manner wasn’t to be confused with weakness. All three had a core of resiliency about them. And although Michael was the quietest, I sensed in him the faint embers of a slowly growing confidence. He was already aware that having performed well in a tough school amid classes of thirty plus and having come from a family where no-one had ever been in higher education, he had travelled further than most to get here. None the less, even he seemed wary of asserting himself. Like his parents – and probably everyone else from his background – he was accustomed to being fobbed off.

This habit was more familiar to me than it might otherwise have been. I came from a pallidly middle class background. Though they didn’t belong to any of the upper echelon professions like medicine or law, my parents were educated and articulate. Neither required much time to puzzle out the meanings concealed in fine print; neither was made apprehensive by filling out forms or grew flustered when confronted by the curt answers given by an impatient official. They would simply ask him/her to repeat what they didn’t understand. In short, they had a pretty secure sense of their place in the world.

But then, when I was sixteen, my father died and I noticed that my mother and I seemed to undergo an inescapable change in status. The local council pursued him for more than a year after his death for unpaid business rates on the small shop he’d owned. My mother and I endured numerous interviews on the topic at the County Hall and throughout each one neither of us seemed able to assert ourselves the way she and my father once had. It was as if, on some animal level, the different functionaries we spoke tosmelt that we represented a diminished family unit and behaved accordingly. The abrupt tones in which they spoke to us implied that it wasour carelessness in losing the senior member of our household rather than their incompetence that had caused this problem.

I saw more of this a few years later as a summer temp filing and stuffing envelopes in the local Citizen’s Advice Bureau. New ‘clients’ would sit hunched across desks from staff, struggling to understand the procedures being explained to them. Glancing over, I recognised the looks of vexed frustration on their faces: they didn’t entirely understand what was going on, and it scared them that they didn’t understand, and the more scared they became the less able they were to understand. It was as if a huge, intricate apparatus was being revealed that was not arranged in their favour. Quite often the frustration erupted into shouting and swearing. If you had arrived just at that moment and had a particular set of prejudices, you might have thought, ‘Well there you go. Isn’t that typical. Those kind of people have no self control.’

Having photocopied Michael’s most important documents, I smiled at him and his parents as encouragingly as I could.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Let’s go back to the accommodation office and get this sorted out for you.’

Outside it had grown overcast. The ugly modernist bulk of the University’s main building faded upward into grey. Rain whipped over the hilltop campus, seeming to blow in from every direction. Dressed for better weather, the students who passed us twisted this way and that, trying to keep their backs to it.

The accommodation office lay amid a warren of corridors, fire doors and narrow staircases. When we finally reached it, I stood to one side with Michael’s parents and watched as he approached the reception desk, holding the form I had filled out and stamped, which confirmed that he was fully entitled to a place in halls of residence.

As he began speaking to the woman who sat behind the desk, I noticed her registering his accent and his hesitations. Gradually her posture changed, grew straighter, and a chill blankness settled over her features, like snow falling on a hillside. Before he could finish speaking, she interrupted him.

‘Did you pay your first semester fees in advance?’ she asked.

‘No, I didn’t realise I was supposed to. Sorry.’

‘No, you’re not,’ she said. ‘But some students choose to do so and that ensures that a record is created for them on the system.’

‘Oh, right. Well I’m sorry, but I’ve been working all summer to save up the money, so I couldn’t really have …’

She sighed.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘Did you receive an email from us confirming that your application for a place in halls had been processed?”

‘No, I didn’t. I just…’

‘But you didn’t think to phone up and check anyway?’

‘No, I mean I’ve been working night shifts and sleeping all day. And your office is only open from eleven till four in July and August, so …’

‘Yes, but if you’d thought to phone we might have found out sooner that there was a problem and we could have corrected it. As it is, there are no places left. But I can let you have a list of reputable private landlords and you can …’

‘Excuse me,’ I said, stepping forward. ‘Perhaps I’m mistaken. But I was under the impression that the University was supposed to be an enlightened institution.’

‘That’s right,’ she replied.

‘Which means that it doesn’t discriminate on the basis of race, gender, social class and so on.’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet you’re trying to tell this student that he’s at fault because he was too busy working this summer to phone up and double check that youroffice hadn’t make a mistake.’

‘Who are you?’ she asked warily.

Eventually Michael got his place in halls and we returned to my office. Dr. Reed’s door was open and I could see that Lawrence Bell and his daughter had left. While Michael and his parents perched on one of the unoccupied desks, I made tea for them. They looked dazed. They had prevailed against authority and couldn’t quite believe it. I wondered if it had ever happened to them before.

Once they’d left – having thanked me more times than I could count – I got back to work. Towards the middle of the afternoon, Dr. Reed reappeared.

‘How did it go with the QC?’ I asked.

He kept his back to me as he bent over the filing cabinet and mumbled something.

‘Sorry?’ I asked.

Sighing, he turned round.

‘The University will let her take the re-sit on her own.’

What? But that’s totally wrong. It was her fault that she …’

‘I know, I know. But her father has a lot of influence and he just wouldn’t have stopped until he got what he wanted.’

He looked sorrowful as he said this, but there was a hint of exasperation too. I sensed that he was debating with himself whether or not to point out to me that such issues only appear simple when you’re young. But it wasn’t in his nature to patronise anyone.

‘I was overruled,’ he said simply.

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