She had met Chester at a house party in Bedfordshire in 1988, a month before her finals. By that point she had given up studying almost entirely. Her life was devoted to cocktail parties and the drama club, and the thought of writing an essay practically sent her to sleep. Chester, in contrast, was in the flush of graduate-student enthusiasm: his long, shy silences would be broken only by loud outbursts against formalism and in favor of Belgian semiotics. He struck her at first as an exotic oddity-as dark, intense and badly dressed as a Russian dissident. Once they had been out together a few times, however, she began to interpret his seriousness, his desperate almost painful need to succeed and his concomitantly dreadful if inarticulable awareness of failure, as a sign of maturity. None of the males she had been with before seemed to care very much about what was coming, probably because they assumed that their lives would be much like their parents’ except with more sex and better gadgetry. But for Chester the future was a fearsome, shaggy-headed ogre which every day he would have to wrestle to the ground and which every morning would be on its feet again strong and resistant as ever. Although these anxieties arose mainly from the particularities of his temperament and class, for Lucilla they were signs of a wonderfully premature oldness. At twenty-four he was fatherly. Within a month she had decided, in the silent but irreversible way of hers, that they had mated for life, and the actual events that followed: Chester’s appointment at the University of the Metropolis, his book, her sparkling success at The Daily Continent, their engagement, were to her just delightful bubbles on the surface-froth while the dark strong riptide of their life together ran irrefutably on.