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Simon Mawer

PRAGUE SPRING

For Sophia and Olivia,

two more of the next generation

I

1

‘Do you really think it makes any sense at all?’ James asked, feeling, for a moment, emboldened. He was sitting at a small, round table, opposite a rather ragged-looking girl, leaning towards her across the table so that they could catch each other’s words amidst the noise. James was feeling nervous because it wasn’t every day that he got this close to someone like Eleanor and he didn’t want to be wafting beery breath all over her in case that should blow her away. Also because, let’s face it, they came from opposite ends of the undergraduate spectrum. She was reading English while he was a scientist of a kind, and she was in her second year whereas he was a fresher. Furthermore – there’s more, we’re going further, into the murky world of class – furthermore, and despite her scruffy appearance, there was something decidedly superior about Eleanor that was noticeable when she spoke, a certain manner of enunciating her consonants, hitting the Ts and Ls and sculpting the vowels, that put her in a social class above James. His voice was vaguely Northern; hers was county. It doesn’t really matter which county. Perhaps even Oxford, although the Oxford voice, with its hooing and its cooing, was really a thing of the past.

But the most decided difference between them was not accent or even social class but the plain biological fact that he was male and therefore one of many thousands, whereas she was female and therefore, within the university, as rare as a nun in a monastery. Perhaps that’s a surprise, considering that nowadays women outnumber men by the fraction that superior intelligence and unwavering work habits give them, but in those days it was so: lots of men, few women. Furthermore, those two contrasting versions of the species lived very separate lives for the simple, administrative, historical, insane reason that the colleges were still single-sex. Thus Eleanor belonged to St Hilda’s, all the way down the High and over the river. Turn right, away from the medieval glories of Magdalen, and you’ll find the rather lesser nineteenth-and twentieth-century glories of St Hilda’s college just there. No tourist bothers, ever. Whereas James lived in the Renaissance glory of one of the old colleges in the city centre, where tourists bother all the time.