Oxford Blood by Antonia Fraser Read Free Book Online

the time like you.'
    'This is unbearable.' Jemima Shore pronounced the word quite distinctly. There was a short silence into which Cherry contributed the diplomatic sentence: 'Poor Jem's twisted her ankle coming down this lethal staircase. She's in agony.'
    'Oh poor darling.' The next moment - Jemima never quite knew how it happened - Tiggie had somehow produced a long cashmere scarf from about her person, possibly from around her tiny waist, and easing off Jemima's pale leather boot, had most deftly bound up the swelling ankle.
    'Now you've got to have a rest.' A faint flush of effort touched Tiggie Jones' pearly white cheeks, allowing Jemima to perceive that much of the whiteness was due to liquid white make-up. 'And a glass of champagne. For shock. Proffy will simply have to provide.'
    Before Jemima could stop her, Tiggie had banged boldly upon Professor Mossbanker's heavily shut door - his sported oak. After a few moments, and a few more bangs, the figure of Professor Mossbanker reappeared. Jemima waited for his wrath to fall. To her surprise, the professor's face actually cleared.
    'Antigone, it's you,' he said with some warmth. 'Did Eugenia get back from Washington last night? I've just read the paper she read in Rome in December at the Conference of Classical and Psychological Studies: Neurosis and Anxiety as depicted in fourth-century Greek vases. Excellent, quite excellent.'
    But the professor, despite an evident affection for his colleague Professor Eugenia Jones, mother of Antigone, still did not have any champagne. 'Alas poor Academe, alas poor Academe,' he cried. 'And especially poor Proffy! Why don't you try our rich young man upstairs? I could do with a glass myself. Make sure it's cold, won't you?'
    But the professor, if he had no champagne, did have a very comfortable sofa, from which he hastened to dump a weight of learned periodicals and papers. Then he sat down on it. Jemima, who had imagined the sofa had been cleared for her, then sat on a much less comfortable chair with a certain wry amusement. It was left to Tiggie to fetch the champagne. It did come from upstairs and was borne down by its owner, the occupant of the top room - none other than Viscount Saffron.
    So for the second time that day, and after all too short an interval, Jemima found herself gazing into the handsome, sulky, strangely un-English face of that notorious Oxford Blood, putative subject of a Megalith Television programme.
    'Is there going to be a party?' enquired Professor Mossbanker, breaking the slightly embarrassed silence. Even Tiggie now seemed to suspect that Jemima's previous encounter with Saffron had been something of a failure and that had she been present - as hired by Megalith - to perform the introduction it might have gone better. The professor alone amongst them displayed a mixture of elation and curiosity, as though he were an anthropologist about to witness strange tribal rites. Jemima thought it surprising that a don, however remote from reality as the professor appeared to be, should not have had his fill of parties, living as he did on the same staircase as Saffron. Or perhaps scientists - it appeared that Proffy was some kind of scientist rather than an anthropologist - were not invited to parties.
    But Tiggie Jones cleared that one up. 'Proffy loves parties, don't you? He says he got to like parties in the war when he was a spy. Weren't you, Proffy? Apparently parties are awf ully important for spying. But I think it's because he's got so many children. He finds parties outside the home rather peaceful compared to life inside Chillington Road. He hates the young, of course, having so many children, but he does love champagne!'
    'How many children do you have, Professor Mossbanker?' Jemima was relieved to find some conventional subject on which she could make polite conversation with the man obliged by Tiggie to be her host. At which a look of deep suspicion crossed the professor's face.
    'Oh, the usual number,