Yet still he gawped – in mad love with the place already but panicked that he did not belong here and would be found out at any moment. (…) That first afternoon unfolded like a beautiful dream: a day of miraculous sixes and a stunning catch and the late afternoon sun toasty on his back, and later a strange dark English-style pub called the Red Lion, with a low ceiling and crossed rowing oars nailed above the bar, where he and Ben sat, drinking and talking easily. The feeling that he was an intruder, a lurker on the edges, slipped away so quickly that Toby felt strangely but happily unmoored from the past. His anchor was up. Nothing significant in his life had happened, or was fondly remembered before he got here.

The College Council were all old boys of St Anton’s, like Gerald, and their decisions about the college were the decisions of men who were frozen in time, back in the fifties or the sixties or seventies, when they were eighteen. When they talked of their college days, it was like they were there again: wearing shorts, lying on some patch of lawn – elbows propped up on … what? A tennis racquet, a hula hoop, a croquet mallet? Some object that belonged to that time and place – not part of their world now. And that was why they paid all that money: for their children to lie on that same lawn, decades later. So they too could enjoy the prison of nothingness – being trapped in a quadrangle with music and animals and books and each other.

where ben suddenly gripped his shoulders and said intensely, ‘Look, Toby, I’m being serious – you’re my palace, you’re my palace,’ and Toby laughed not knowing what he meant, but thinking it had something to do with Ben’s depression of last semester, and the shelter you could find in each other. He and Ben had once known everything about one another. Nothing had seemed real or permanent in his life until he told Ben about it. And now Toby missed him – really missed him. He was still there – still at college, still in the much-coveted room that looked over the stables –yet at the same time he wasn’t there at all. And it wasn’t just Ben whom Toby missed; it was himself. That was the great gift of friendship: your friends gave you you – the idea of yourself that is your best self.