Oscar and Lucinda

"Look at you," said Wardley-Fish. "You look like a gri

"Of course," he said at last, "I am wearing your coat. Doubtless it creates an odd effect." Wardley-Fish looked at the Odd Bod's wild red hair, his neat triangular face, his earnest prayingmantis hands clasped on his breast and-just when he began to laugh-saw that Oscar was not joking. The Odd Bod imagined himself quite normal.

When they pushed through the crowd towards the paddock, Wardley-Fish was still laughing. He could not stop himself. He laughed while he made his bets. Oscar watched him, smiling. He thought the laugh to do with betting. Wardley-Fish placed his bets in total disregard for the system, going from bookmaker to bookmaker, laying everything on Madding Girl with tears streaming down his face.

My great-grandfather watched him long enough to see how a bet was made and then, selecting Perce Gully, he laid three guineas on Sure Blaze at 9–1.

My great-grandfather won his first bet. In the case histories of pathological gamblers you find the same story told time and time again.

3 °Covetousness

When Mr Stratton entered the comfortable rooms of his Oxford friends-and he was better co

Hugh Stratton iwas not an Oxford Scholar but was a Scholar of Oxford. And as lonelly civil servants in Hong Kong may know more about the goings on in Knightsbridge than anyone who really lives there, so it was with Hutgh Stratton and Oxford. When he brought Oscar up to undergo his interview with Hawkins (the Provost of Oriel) he was also able to bring the news of a certain controversy about the election of Merton Fellowss/ which had travelled to He

Covetousness

looking down on him. His shabby clothes proclaimed him a poor clergyman with no place here. He had red mud caked on his trouser turnups and the gentlemen of Oriel, encountering him as he cut across to the chapel, averted their eyes from him, but not so much, he imagined, as not to note the fine red capillaries that had begun, just this year, to show on his nose and cheeks. When he brought Oscar through these portals he stopped him here, in the middle of the path across the quad, to tell him that he was jealous of him. But as he did it with a wistful smile upon his face, Oscar had no way of guessing the extent of it. The young man understood him as he might understand any older man pining for his youth. He did guess the jagged edges of this jealousy which had lacerated Hugh Stratton, more on every day that passed, none more than at this moment when they stood inside the quad. One would stay. One would be cast out. But jealousy was not the only serpent stirring the muddy waters of Hugh Stratton's unhappy soul. He could attempt to lay it by admitting it, but the other he could not even admit-the dreadful guilty truth was that he had made no provision for the cost of this education. When his wife had raised the question he had waved his handkerchief as if it were nothing but a march fly to be sent away. "I have told you. He can be a servitor."

"But have you written to Hawkins on the matter?"

"I would not pester the Provost with such a matter."

"Then pester Temple or Fisher, but pester someone, dear Hugh, don't you think you should?" He never did it and now he found there was no possibility of Oscar paying his way by taking a servitor's position. Oriel already had enough young men who must, if not sing, then wait a table for their supper. If Oscar was to be a servitor he must wait his turn. In the meantime the bursar was assuming that the Strattons would foot the bill. Mr Stratton had not enlightened him, but it was out of the question. So when Hugh Stratton, continuing his interrupted walk across the rainbright quad, led his protégé into that lovely little vaulted chapel where he nad once-fair-haired, apple-cheeked-been so admired for the purity °f his voice, he was not merely miserable with jealousy, teetering on the edge of grief, but also guilty about this financial matter, a thing he should not, so he felt, have to be guilty about at all. He had inended to take Oscar on a grand tour, a three-hour event he had, when Imagining it, expected to be a pleasant experience for both of them.

ut now he had a blinding headache and he turned back at the door

Oscar and Lucinda

to the library and bade his protégé good bye and good luck.

To Oscar, Mr Stratton's moods would always be a mystery, so much so that he had ceased to try to fathom them. He knew that his mentor had pla

"Your father must take responsibility," the clergyman told Oscar as they sheltered in the gatehouse. "He ca

Theophilus, unlike Oscar, would have the benefit of a full revelation of Mr Stratton's thoughts on this matter, but he would not pay a pe

He thought: my papa is dying. And indeed so convinced was he that his greatest fear (that his father would die without their reconciliation) had become a reality that he began immediately to fetch his big brown suitcase out from its hiding place in the window seat. He had this in his hand when he answered the Reverend Mr Stratton's sharp, beak-like knock.