not settled down to be a student. In 1901, when Dorothy suddenly went to Munich, Tom was eighteen. In 1907, he was twenty-four, a young man, not a youth. He had gone through broken-out skin and new stubble on lip and cheek, his voice had rounded out, his gold hair thickened and coarsened. He had gone through believing he wanted to go to Cambridge with Julian and Charles, to knowing, without allowing himself to know he knew, that he must avoid this, that it would destroy him. During these five years he went on walking holidays with Toby Youlgreave, and sometimes with Julian, and sometimes with Joachim and Charles as well. These were supposed to be “reading” holidays, and Tom was supposed to be learning. He read a lot. He read books of woodcraft, and books of knightly romance, and books about the earth. He knew a lot of lyric poetry. He had interesting conversations with Toby about Shakespeare and Marlowe, but when he did finally get into a schoolroom with an exam script before him, he had the odd sensation that he did not know who he was, that there was nobody there capable of setting pen to paper. Some kind of automaton in his place wrote some pages of banal nonsense. He failed. He was more afraid of becoming unreal than of failing to progress in his education, but that, too, he did not put into words. He wrote things in the Tree House, and burned them, in case anyone found them. He became secretive. Most of what he felt he really was, was incommunicable to his companions who were striding or sauntering into the social world. He knew the woods. He watched the trees age and thicken and spread. He watched saplings struggle and take hold, he saw the keepers axing the rotten beeches. He wanted, but he did not know he wanted, to be like Ann, to stay in a world, in a time, where every day was an age, and every day resembled the one before. Some of the time, he lived in the old story. He found himself muttering and murmuring with his back to an oak where Tom Underground had faced a pack of wolves with a flaming brand, or running easily along tracks as though he was himself a wild creature, a wolf.
This was both intensely satisfying, and sickly, like masturbation and its aftermath.
Tom might have been different, Dorothy thought later, if Dorothy’s sense of time had not been completely the opposite of his. It began when she came back from Munich. She was seventeen, he was nineteen, they had been inseparable, she had followed him like a squire, like an animal helper, through furrows and thickets. But she did not tell him about Anselm Stern, and only casually mentioned Wolfgang and Leon, as exciting new acquaintances. Tom could have been forgiven for thinking Dorothy had fallen in love with one of these Germans, but his thoughts didn’t run that way, love was something he sheered away from. He felt, simply, excluded. He was like a wild animal ranging round a stockade, or a forest house, trying to get in, to find a slit or slot, and failing.
This sense of Dorothy’s distance was exacerbated, for both of them, by the artificial—that is, nothing to do with the weather and the earth—timetable she had set herself, or discovered had been set for her. The parents and tutors were not wholly helpful with this. The person who told Dorothy what she had taken on, how very much work was ahead of her, was Leslie Skinner, who took a fatherly interest in her, and once, involuntarily, stroked her hair.
She would need to matriculate, he said. She would need to pass Latin, English, Maths, General Elementary Science, and one of: Greek, French, German, Sanskrit, Arabic, Elementary Mechanics, Elementary Chemistry, Elementary Sound, Heat and Light, Elementary Magnetism and Electricity, Elementary Botany.
After successfully matriculating, there would be the Preliminary Scientific Examination, in Chemistry and Physics, and General Biology.
In order to get the MB degree she would need
To have passed the matriculation exam not less than five years previously.
To have passed the Preliminary Scientific Exam not less than four years previously.
To