I told Professor Cousins that I’d come to write a note to him and he gestured wildly in the direction of his desk and said, ‘On you go, my dear, on you go then.’ It seemed the easiest thing to do somehow, so I slipped behind his desk and got out a pad of paper and started writing.

Professor Cousins’ desk was very untidy, scattered with little bits of paper on which he had scrawled messages to himself in his spiky italic hand – ‘Buy fish!’ ‘Find glove!’ ‘Send letter!’

‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,’ he exclaimed suddenly, just as Martha Sewell passed his open door. She gave him an unreadable look. Professor Cousins waved to her. ‘That’s what I’m supposed to be teaching, isn’t it?’ he said to me.

‘Yes.’

He sighed, looking very downcast.

‘I’m not in the lecture theatre either,’ I said in a feeble effort to comfort him. He made a helpless gesture and returned to the filing-cabinet, muttering something to himself on the lines of ‘Mummery flummery, mimsy whimsy, blah, blah, blah,’ before wandering out into the corridor, bleating Joan’s name in the ridiculous helpless tone he adopted in the belief that it endeared him to Joan, when in fact it drove her up the wall. When he’d gone I propped up my note for him between ‘Go to Draffens!’ and ‘Joan’s birthday!’ and discreetly pocketed the one that said ‘Mark Honours essays!’

Seeing Martha had been a blow as I had been hoping to avoid her two o’clock creative writing tutorial, but now that she’d seen me I supposed I was going to have to put in an appearance in her class. I looked up and was startled to see Watson Grant lowering in the doorway.

‘Goodness, what happened to you?’ I said to him, for his head was bandaged up and he was sporting a black eye that made him look more manly than he really was.

‘Mugged,’ he said miserably. ‘I was concussed, I’m lucky I’m not dead.’

Professor Cousins came back at that moment, bearing aloft a cup of Joan-made tea. ‘Good God, man,’ he cried when he saw Grant Watson, ‘what on earth happened to you?’ When Watson Grant explained, Professor Cousins said, ‘Laid low by some anonymous stranger in the dark, eh?’ He proffered a Nuttall’s Minto but Grant Watson declined. ‘Concussion,’ Professor Cousins reminisced dreamily, ‘I was concussed once – during the war, or a war, certainly. Unconscious for the best part of an hour. When I came round I couldn’t remember anything, had no idea who I was. I rather liked it, looking back,’ he sighed regretfully; ‘a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper. A fresh start.’

‘And do you know who you are now?’ Watson Grant asked him with a little more asperity than usual. Professor Cousins looked thoughtful. ‘Well, I know who I think I am.’

Me, I am Euphemia Stuart-Murray. I am the last of my line. My mother is not my mother.

‘I’ve been to a philosophy tutorial,’ Bob said, the unfamiliar word sitting uncomfortably on his tongue. Bob had no idea how he’d ended up taking five of his eight degree papers in philosophy and presumed it must be due to an administrative error somewhere. And, of course, philosophy attracted exactly the wrong kind of girls for Bob – earnest intellectual ones, for example, who wanted to discuss Foucault and Adorno and other people Bob had tried very hard not to hear of. If Bob could have designed a girl he would have started by getting rid of her vocal cords. In Bob’s ideal world, Bob’s girl would be, not me, but Lieutenant Uhura or Honeybunch Kaminski. Or – better still – Shug.

Bob frowned at a photocopied sheet he must have been given in the tutorial and started catechizing me. ‘Have you ever heard of Secondary Rules of Inference?’

‘No.’

‘The Law of the Excluded Middle?’

‘Sounds like something from Gilbert and Sullivan.’

‘Is that a no?’

‘Yes.’

He looked at me doubtfully. ‘Monadic predicates?’

‘No.’

‘Hypothetical Syllogisms?’

‘Not really.’

‘Not really?’ Bob said. ‘What kind of an answer is that?’

‘OK – no, then.’

‘The Law of Identity?’

‘Well . . .’

‘Yes or no?’

‘No,’ I said irritably, ‘this is boring.’

‘You’re telling me. Reductio ad Absurdum?’

‘Endlessly.’

Bob waved a sheaf of past exam papers in my face and said, ‘This stuff’s unbelievable. Listen.’ (‘Stuff’ was Bob’s all-purpose word for everything.) He proceeded to read a question, in a ponderous tone, from the exam paper –

(a) Cupar is north of Edinburgh.

(b) Dundee is north of Edinburgh.

(c) Cupar is not north of Dundee.

(d) Cupar is between Edinburgh and Dundee.

(e) There are places between Edinburgh and Dundee.

(f) If one place is south of a second place, then the second is north of the first.

(g) If one place is between two others, and is north of the first, it is south of the second.

(‘Nxy’ is ‘x is north of y’; ‘sxy’ is ‘x is south of y’; ‘bxyz’ is ‘x is between y and z’; ‘c’ is Cupar’; ‘d’ is ‘Dundee’; ‘e’ is ‘Edinburgh’; universe of discourse: places). Show by formal derivation that (a), (d), (f) and (g) together imply (b). You may need to supply a further premise expressing one of the properties of ‘is north of’ referred to above.)

Heather had recently declared that separatism was the way forward for women and the logical conclusion of this, she explained, was that we must all become lesbians. Heather was having some trouble finding anyone willing to take her up on this theory, let alone the praxis, although Philippa had volunteered (‘Well, I’m willing to give it a go,’) as if we were talking about playing a new rule in lacrosse.

Heather glared at me and then continued zealously, ‘The subordination and oppression of women within capitalism is the real issue. We all know that male hegemony leads to the oppression and subjugation of women.’ Kara nodded in vigorous agreement, without taking her eyes off the piece of petit-point she was absorbed in stitching.

Olivia smelt of Miss Dior while Sheila was wearing babyscent, which is a perfume made from Milton fluid, curds and vomit. The newest little Lake was outside in the corridor in a handed-down Silver Cross pram built like a tank.

‘Engels says that the emancipation of women remains impossible as long as women are excluded from socially productive work . . .’ This was just like being in one of Archie’s tutorials, except I could tell Heather to shut up when she got too overbearing.

‘So you don’t think being a housewife is socially productive work?’ Sheila snapped at Heather. Proteus turned his head and gave her a surprised look.

‘Well, Sheila,’ Heather said carefully, ‘in a society defined by the white, western, ruling-class male—’

‘Exactly,’ Kara said. Philippa barged into the room at that moment, lugging a mountain of student essays and a bag of hamster bedding and apologizing loudly for her lateness. ‘I was doing the Cartesian Circle with first-years,’ she said, making it sound like an exotic eastern European folk dance or a forgotten play by Brecht.

‘We were talking about the sexual imperialism of housework,’ Heather said.

‘You were,’ Sheila said tartly.

In my opinion, these meetings would have been much improved by the presence of a few men. Seeing Philippa reminded me of Ferdinand – I wondered if he was awake by now and if I could find the time to visit the McCue house today and come upon him as if by chance.

I was distracted suddenly from these pleasant thoughts by noticing that, like the eyes in certain portraits, Heather’s nipples seemed to have the uncanny ability to follow you round the room. This is the kind of observation that once made, cannot be unmade. Unfortunately.

‘Some of us have to stay home and rear the children,’ Sheila spat at Heather. ‘If it was left up to you, the human race would die out.’

‘It won’t be long before men are relegated to a biological footnote anyway,’ Philippa said breezily and then, apropos of nothing, ‘We’re having a party tonight, by the way, everyone’s welcome.’ In my experience, a party is simply an invitation to disaster but everyone in the room nodded and murmured enthusiastically. Everyone except Sheila who reared up like a cobra in front of Heather and said, ‘You think that screwing anyone that takes your fancy is a gender equality issue.’

‘Well, Sheila,’ Heather said querulously, ‘if you want to be the private property of some man, that’s up to you.’

‘Better to be private property than to be a public whore,’ Sheila hissed triumphantly. Heather suddenly grabbed a chair and prodded it at Sheila like a lion tamer (this is how accidents happen) and screamed, ‘At least I’ve worked out how to use birth control.’

I decided discretion was the better part of valour and made my apologies: ‘I’ve got an essay to do.’ Olivia followed me out, handing Proteus back to Kara who gestured vaguely at the Moses basket at her feet. Olivia replaced him in the basket and pushed it under Kara’s chair as far out of harm’s way as it would go.

The last thing I heard as she closed the door was a high-pitched wail as if someone had jabbed a baby with a pin.

‘I don’t know why people bring children into the world,’ Olivia said. ‘They don’t seem to love them and the world’s so awful anyway.’

‘Have you got an essay on George Eliot, Olivia?’ I asked (rather callously, I can see now).

‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t choose that one. I’ve got a Charlotte Brontë if that’s any good to you?’ She was going to say something else but then she started to look uncomfortable and fled towards the toilets. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I think I’m going to be sick.’

I followed her and held her lovely blond hair out of the way for her.

‘Thank you,’ she said politely.

‘Do you want that coffee now?’ I asked, but she shook her head and said she was going home. Olivia lived in a civilized flat on the Perth Road that she shared with three other girls. All four of them knew how to cook and use a sewing-machine and they held ‘dinner parties’ and shared Immac and Stergene and did each other’s hair and cleaned up each other’s vomit when necessary. Olivia had a pleasant room painted dark green, full of nice things like oil-lamps and healthy plants and old embroidered linen from Dens Road market. Olivia sat in her pleasant room and listened to Bach and Pachelbel and worked hard, waiting for Roger Lake to squeeze her into his timetable.

‘I’ve been to the pound,’ she said, looking more downcast than usual.

‘The pound?’

‘The lost dogs’ home. To look for the yellow dog. He wasn’t there though.’

Perhaps Chick had taken the yellow dog to his own home, decided to make a pet of it, but that seemed unlikely somehow. I couldn’t even imagine Chick having a home, much less keeping a dog in it.

We sat in the foyer discussing the dog’s whereabouts right through the two o’clock bell and the general hubbub of people going to lectures and only at ten minutes past the hour could we finally bring ourselves to make our way to Martha’s room.

We were delayed further by Dr Dick haranguing us in the English department corridor about unwritten work and unattended tutorials and only breaking off to declare himself ill. He did look rather sick – his skin as white and waxy as an arum lily – but no more than usual.

‘Do you have symptoms?’ I quizzed. ‘Sore throat? Headache? Swollen glands?’

‘Headache,’ he said hopefully.

‘Pounding, throbbing behind the eyes? Or dull ache at the back of the head?’

He looked unsure. ‘Well, a sort of sharp, piercing pain at the temple.’

‘Brain tumour, then,’ Terri said.

‘Go and lie down,’ I suggested gently, ‘and try not to think about marking essays.’ Luckily he took this advice and went off, clutching his forehead and moaning quietly to himself.

‘Ah, there you are,’ Professor Cousins said, leaping out of his room and doing a little jig in front of me. ‘I was hoping I would see you today,’ he said. ‘I was going to ask you about our mutual friend.’ There seemed no point in telling Professor Cousins that it was only an hour or so since he had last seen me since time, as we all know, is a subjective kind of thing.

‘Our mutual friend?’ I queried.

‘The dog of yesterday. And Chick, as well, of course,’ Professor Cousins said fondly. ‘Quite a wag, isn’t he?’

‘We have to go to Martha’s creative writing class now,’ I explained to him; ‘we’re already late.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ Professor Cousins said. ‘I’ve always wanted to know what creative writing really is. And does it have an opposite?’ he laughed, manoeuvring himself between us and taking an arm of each as if we were about to do some complicated reel.

Martha always bade us move our terminally uncomfortable chairs into a circle, as if we were in therapy or about to play one of those getting-to-know-you games – ‘My name is Effie and if I was an animal I would be a . . .’ But what would I choose to be? Not a domestic pet, surely, forever at the whim and behest of someone who thought they owned you, and certainly not a beast of the field useful only for its milk and meat and skin. Some shy creature perhaps, hidden deep in the untamed forest?

There was the usual roll-call of names – Andrea, Kevin, Robin, Kara, Janice Rand, Davina. Davina was a keen mature student from Kirkcaldy, a divorcee and one of the few grown-ups at the university. Shug didn’t do the creative writing paper, saying that his mother’s weekly Willie Low shopping-list was a more creative piece of writing than anything produced at the university. Bob did do the creative writing paper, he just didn’t know it. For weeks, Martha had stood at the front of the class at the beginning of every hour and frowned at the class list in front of her, puzzling, ‘Robert Sharpe? Does anyone know a Robert Sharpe?’ I never spoke up, I didn’t really want to admit to knowing Bob.

I was sitting next to Terri – a black wolf prowling the night. Terri’s assignment for Martha was poetry. Terri’s poems came under the collective title My Favourite Suicide and you can probably imagine the content matter. Some of them (although undoubtedly derivative) were surprisingly cheerful –

‘I think we should begin with a little exercise to flex our writing muscles,’ Martha said, speaking very slowly as if she was on prescription drugs but I think it was just her way of trying to communicate with people less intelligent than she thought she was. How tedious this all seemed. I wasn’t sure I could sit still for a whole hour.

‘Write me a paragraph,’ Martha enunciated clearly, ‘in just ten minutes, which incorporates these three words – bracteate, trowel and vilifies.’

‘That’s four words,’ objected Robin, sitting next to me in the circle. Robin was wearing a leather trench coat that had apparently once belonged to a member of the Waffen SS.

Martha gave him a considered look. ‘Not the and,’ she said finally.

‘Not the and,’ Professor Cousins chuckled, ‘a strange sentence if ever there was one; it could only possibly make sense in context, couldn’t it?’ Martha made a resigned kind of noise and busied herself with the insides of her briefcase.

Professor Cousins was sitting between Kara and Davina. Davina was writing an historical thing about Shakespeare’s mother, Wordsworth’s sister or Emily Brontë’s hitherto unmentioned illegitimate daughter – I could never quite remember which. Personally, I don’t think it right to make up things about real people – although I suppose there’s an argument for saying that once you’re dead you’re not real any more. But then we have to define what we mean by real and none of us wants to go down that tortuous path because we all know where it leads (madness or a first class honours, or both).

Martha turned back to the class and said sternly, ‘A paragraph with structure to it, not abstract free-fall. No nonsense.’

I wrote down bracteate, trowel and vilifies and then sat staring at them. I seemed to remember doing this exercise in one of the many primary schools I had attended, although with more useful words (sand, bucket, red, or perhaps porridge, bowl, hot). I had no idea what bracteate meant. It sounded like a kind of seaweed. I doodled helplessly.

Professor Cousins meanwhile was labouring diligently over his work, making strange exploded diagrams with spidery connecting lines. He was too far away for me to copy anything from him; the light in Martha’s room was scanty. Kara, on his other side, leant over surreptitiously to try and see what he was writing but Professor Cousins put his arm protectively around his scribblings, like a small boy. The Moses basket that contained Proteus had been shoved more or less into the middle of the circle of chairs, as if he was going to be the centrepiece of a voodoo ritual.

Kara was writing a Lawrentian kind of novella about a woman who goes back to the land to discover her emotional and sexual roots, a journey which seemed to involve unnecessarily large amounts of dung and mud and seed of all kinds, but mainly male. Strangely, the genteel Martha seemed to relate to this. At some previous point in her life she chose to suddenly ‘share’ with us, she had run a smallholding in upstate New York with her first husband, a famous playwright whom she couldn’t believe none of us had heard of. Martha said she and this first husband had found ‘the continuous juxtaposition of the cerebral and the bestial in country life very stimulating’. As she ‘shared’ she fingered the bird claw at her neck, a faraway look in her eyes.

Anyway, she concluded with a somewhat rueful sigh, the outcome of all this had been a return to urban living accompanied by (sadly) a divorce on account of the playwright’s rampant adultery, but also (happily) Martha’s first collection of poetry, Chicken Spirits, ‘Critically acclaimed, but hardly a bestseller. But then which would you rather have, after all?’

‘A bestseller?’ Andrea suggested.

Martha was planning to break out of the ghetto of poetry. She had, she claimed, an unwritten novel, which seemed like a contradiction in terms to me (like the unspoken word). Martha’s novel was about a female author getting over her writer’s block by discovering that in a former life she had been Pliny the Elder – so probably not a bestseller.

‘They say everyone has a novel inside them, don’t they?’ Janice Rand suddenly piped up.

‘Not everyone can write it though, Janice,’ Martha admonished gravely.

There was some kind of commotion going on outside, every so often a shout of ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ went up and I wondered if the protesters knew he was dead, and if that made any difference. Martha glanced out of the window and frowned at what she saw.

I tried the words in a different order – trowel, vilifies, bracteate – but this didn’t result in any inspiration. Martha was always urging us to ‘Write what you know,’ (how boring books would be if everyone adhered to that principle!) but although vilifies was a word I felt comfortable with, my knowledge of bracteates and trowels was limited. Oh, for a good etymological dictionary to be carried on one’s person at all times.

Martha wandered over to the window and leant with her forehead on the glass as if she was trying to absorb daylight. (I was surprised we didn’t all have rickets.) Andrea used this opportunity to lean over and whisper to me that she thought a bracteate was a kind of animal, possibly a frog. Which sounded like wishful thinking to me. Nora, of course, believes that we all have a totem animal, a manifestation of our spiritual nature in the animal world. (‘Your mother sounds kind of cool,’ Andrea said. Misguidedly.)

Andrea whispered in my ear that she thought her spirit animal was a cat. How predictable. Why do girls always think of themselves as cats? I didn’t suppose Andrea would much enjoy ripping the insides out of tiny helpless mammals or licking her own nether regions or being chased by mad dogs or eating cat food without the help of cutlery.

Kevin’s glasses had slipped down his nose as he stared at bracteate, trowel and vilifies. If we were animals (which we are, I know), Kevin would be a sponge – a sea-cucumber perhaps or something rounder and squishier. But what I might be I did not know. ( I prefer monosyllables. They stick to the page better.)

‘Surely sponges aren’t animals?’ Andrea puzzled.

‘What do you think they are then?’

‘Vegetables?’ she hazarded.

This was a bit like playing ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ with Bob, or – worse – asking Bob general knowledge questions. (Question: ‘What is Formosa now called? Bob’s answer: ‘Cheese?’)

Andrea gave up and started colouring the words in instead.

‘Right,’ Martha said suddenly, ‘ten minutes are up.’ Only ten minutes had passed? What a nightmare. How long would it take before the hour was up? I calculated miserably – nearly three thousand words at this rate, more than ten pages. Time for some omission and reduction. Surely no-one would miss, for example, nine sentences on the theme of ‘The man vilifies the bracteate trowel.’ And so on.

‘I didn’t say a sentence,’ Martha reprimanded irritably, ‘I asked for a paragraph. I asked for text. Do you understand what text is?’ You could tell that she wanted to slip the word ‘morons’ into this sentence somewhere.

‘Well, according to Proust,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully, ‘it’s a web.’ Professor Cousins hadn’t even managed a sentence, despite all his diagrams.

‘Does this mean,’ he asked Martha plaintively, ‘that I should abandon all hope of becoming a writer?’

‘Yes,’ Martha said.

‘Thank goodness for that,’ Professor Cousins said.

‘Let’s turn to your assignments,’ Martha said tetchily.

‘Those last little yolks,’ Martha said, nodding sagely, ‘so good for an egg custard.’

The mewing noise that Proteus had been making throughout this critique suddenly escalated into a loud bawling and Kara hauled him out of his basket and slapped him carelessly on a breast. We moved on swiftly to Davina and everyone prepared for extreme boredom. It wasn’t that Davina couldn’t write it was just that she had nothing to say. Andrea wasn’t much better. ‘Anthea’s not been doing much lately,’ Andrea said, looking rather faint.

‘Does she ever?’ Robin said.

‘All right, all right,’ Andrea said and began to read reluctantly. ‘The bees could be heard before they were seen.’

‘Have you started?’ Kara asked.

‘Yes, of course I’ve started,’ Andrea said peevishly. ‘Shall I start again?’ she asked Martha.

‘If you must.’

‘The bees could be heard before they were seen. The girl, leaning out of the window, thinking about what her father had said at breakfast, worried, irrationally, she knew, that the bees would fly into her hair –’

‘The bees?’ Martha checked. ‘As in honey?’ Perhaps like me she had been under the delusion that they were alphabet Bs, imagining them in a monoliteral swarm around Andrea’s head.

‘She preferred not to think about where her fears came from. She was, though she did not know it, on the brink of an unhappy discovery. Would she have cared if she had known? And yet in some way, she already knew everything.’

Martha stifled a yawn.

‘Then she’s omniscient?’ Davina asked. ‘But you have to be a narrator to be omniscient, don’t you? She doesn’t narrate, she’s . . . narrated.’

I am narrated therefore I am. What would that be – a narratee? That can’t be a word. It sounds like a sea-animal. The young narratees leapt and frolicked in the wake of the ship. The narratees swam in playful circles.

‘Effie?’ Martha said. ‘Something you want to share with us?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Your assignment?’

‘It’s at a problematic stage, I need to work on the metastructure some more.’

Martha raised a perfect circumflex of an eyebrow and gave me a pitying look. ‘Try,’ she said.

I sighed and started to read –

‘I should be a rich woman, Jack Gannet,’ Madame Astarti said to him, ‘for all the thoughts I’m having today.’

‘Take a stroll along the prom?’ Jack Gannet said, offering her his arm.

‘Always the gentleman, Jack,’ Madame Astarti murmured appreciatively. Indeed ‘Gentleman Jack’ had been his nickname during his days on the Met, on account of his good manners, but Jack Gannet didn’t like that, he thought it made him sound too like a criminal. And Jack Gannet was perhaps one of the straightest coppers on the force. Jack Gannet and Madame Astarti went a long way back, almost as far as Sheffield and that was a very long way indeed. There had been a few occasions during his rise to Chief Inspector when he had been thankful for Madame Astarti’s help, not that he liked to admit it.

‘It’s not the weather for murder,’ Jack Gannet sighed, wiping his brow.

‘Murder?’ Madame Astarti queried sharply.

‘The woman found in the sea, just had the pathologist’s report back on the body. It was decomposing fast, of course, bodies don’t last long in the sea, especially in this weather. Ice-cream?’

Madame Astarti felt confused. The woman was killed by ice-cream?

Jack Gannet stopped suddenly so that Madame Astarti, whose braking distance was quite long, slammed into him.

‘Rigatoni’s,’ Jack said cheerfully, ‘the best scoop in the north.’ They were outside the big Rigatoni ice-cream parlour on the Prom, the flagship one, and he opened the door and gestured Madame Astarti inside and to a table in the window. A buxom waitress appeared and smiled warmly at Jack.

‘Hello, Deirdre,’ he said. ‘I think we’d both like a Five-Scoop-Sundae-Special, please, even though it’s a Saturday,’ he added and Deirdre laughed, far too much, Madame Astarti thought, for such a feeble joke.

‘How was she killed?’ Madame Astarti asked eagerly, sticking her fan-shaped wafer into the heart of her sundae.

‘Difficult to say for sure,’ Jack Gannet frowned, ‘but it looks like she was strangled.’

‘Crime of passion, perhaps,’ Madame Astarti said thoughtfully.

‘Well,’ Jack Gannet said. ‘You know that frog–’

But if she was me she wouldn’t say such nasty things.

‘OK,’ Robin said. ‘I’ve been reworking a scene from Life Sentence. I wasn’t really happy with it before. I’ll just read all the parts, shall I? Unless someone else wants to read? No? Right, well this is the scene where Dod, Jed and Kenny are discussing whether Rick had been right to do what he did –’ Robin took a deep breath and closed his eyes. There was silence for quite a long time and then he suddenly started reading:

I was just searching in my pocket for a handkerchief – I was sure I was coming down with a cold, I was feeling quite light-headed – when I discovered a crumpled piece of paper. I spread it out on the little desk-table and discovered it was the page of The Expanding Prism of J where J falls over the banister. I wished I’d found it earlier, I could have handed it in to Martha and pretended I’d written it – I expected it was just the kind of writing she would like.

‘Do you think you could pay attention?’ Martha said to me so I screwed the piece of paper up in a ball and stuffed it back in my pocket.

‘And so, finally, to Kevin,’ she said, turning her gaze reluctantly on our fantasist. ‘How is Edrakonia this week, Kevin?’ Martha had tried to persuade Kevin that his magnum opus was not suitable for the course assignment and had indeed told him at one point she was going to fail him point blank if he didn’t stop writing ‘garbage’, but lately she seemed to have become inured to Edrakonia. If nothing else, Kevin could be relied upon to have actually done some writing and there was something about the eager expression on his bovine face that made you feel so dreadfully sorry for him that you couldn’t help but encourage his one pleasure in life. Kevin read in a kind of Benny Hill accent –

‘No,’ Kevin said.

‘Because if it is,’ Robin persisted, ‘it’s a really crap name.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Thank you,’ Kevin said sarcastically, ‘Trusty steward Lart, were journeying to the Vale of Tyra-Shakir for the great celebration of the feast of Joppa—’

‘That’s in Edinburgh,’ Andrea objected. ‘They’re hardly going to go on some great epic journey on their stupid shaggy mountain ponies to go to Edinburgh, are they?’

Kevin ignored her. ‘It will be difficult travelling but the feast must be observed—’ Kevin interrupted himself for once to explain, ‘Of course, parties really are a pre-Murk thing, the Murk is a bit like Cromwell’s Protectorate,’ he explained, ‘no singing, no dancing, that kind of thing.’

Professor Cousins looked perplexed. ‘And so . . . the dragons are Royalists?’

‘No, no, no,’ Kevin scowled, ‘the dragons don’t hold with affiliation.’ His face took on a dreamy expression. ‘Before the Murk, the Duke Thar-Vint was renowned for his parties – the food was wonderful, naturally—’

‘Naturally,’ Martha said.

‘The entertainments were spectacular – the famous acrobats of Hartha-Melchior, the jugglers of Wei-Wan, the dressage horses from the plains of—’

‘Kevin,’ Martha said looking very pained, ‘could you just get on?’

‘If the Duke Thar-Vint hadn’t stolen the treasure of Alsinelg to begin with he wouldn’t be in this mess,’ Kara said.

‘Yes, but that’s the whole point,’ Kevin said crossly.

‘Kevin,’ Martha warned.