‘I assume you’re excepting your own scones, Mrs Piper. No one in their right mind would accuse those of being dry.’
Mrs Piper did not succumb to flattery. ‘It’s a bannock. They’re bannocks. My grandmother called them bannocks, my mother called them bannocks, so bannocks they are.’
‘Why’s it – why are they – called bannocks?’ Robin asked. The sound of the word made him imagine a monster of the hills, some clawed and gristly thing that wouldn’t be satisfied unless given a sacrifice of bread.
‘Because of Latin,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘Bannock comes from panicium, meaning “baked bread”.’
This seemed plausible, if disappointingly mundane. Robin took another bite of the bannock, or scone, and this time relished the thick, satisfying way it settled on his stomach.
He and Mrs Piper quickly bonded over a deep love of scones. She made them every which way – plain, served with a bit of clotted cream and raspberry jam; savoury and studded with cheese and garlic chives; or dotted through with bits of dried fruit. Robin liked them best plain – why ruin what was, in his opinion, perfect from conception? He had just learned about Platonic forms, and was convinced scones were the Platonic ideal of bread. And Mrs Piper’s clotted cream was wonderful, light and nutty and refreshing all at once. Some households simmered milk for nearly a full day on the stove to get that layer of cream on top, she told him, but last Christmas Professor Lovell had brought her a clever silver-work contraption that could separate the cream in seconds.
Professor Lovell liked plain scones the least, though, so sultana scones were the staple of their afternoon teas.
‘Why are they called sultanas?’ Robin asked. ‘They’re just raisins, aren’t they?’
‘I’m not sure, dear,’ said Mrs Piper. ‘Perhaps it’s where they’re from. Sultana does sound rather Oriental, doesn’t it? Richard, where are these grown? India?’
‘Asia Minor,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘And they’re sultanas, not sultans, because they haven’t got seeds.’
Mrs Piper winked at Robin. ‘Well, there you have it. It’s all about the seeds.’
Robin didn’t understand this joke, but he knew he didn’t like sultanas in his scones; when Professor Lovell wasn’t looking, he picked out his sultanas, slathered the denuded scone in clotted cream, and popped it in his mouth.
Apart from scones, Robin’s other great indulgence was novels. The two dozen tomes he’d received every year in Canton had been a meagre trickle. Now he had access to a veritable flood. He was never without a book, but he had to get creative in squeezing leisure reading into his schedule – he read at the table, scarfing down Mrs Piper’s meals without a second thought to what he was putting in his mouth; he read while walking in the garden, though this made him dizzy; he even tried reading in the bath, but the wet, crumpled fingerprints he left on a new edition of Defoe’s Colonel Jack shamed him enough to make him give up the practice.
He enjoyed novels more than anything else. Dickens’s serials were well and fun, but what a pleasure it was to hold the weight of an entire, finished story in his hands. He read any genre he could get his hands on. He enjoyed all of Jane Austen’s oeuvre, though it took much consulting with Mrs Piper to understand the social conventions Austen described. (Where was Antigua? And why was Sir Thomas Bertram always going there?[10]) He devoured the travel literature of Thomas Hope and James Morier, through whom he met the Greeks and the Persians, or at least some fanciful version of them. He greatly enjoyed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though he could not say the same of the poems by her less talented husband, whom he found overly dramatic.
Upon his return from Oxford that first term, Professor Lovell took Robin to a bookshop – Hatchards on Piccadilly, just opposite Fortnum & Mason. Robin paused outside the green-painted entrance, gaping. He’d passed by bookshops many times during his jaunts about the city, but never had he imagined he might be allowed to go inside. He had somehow developed the idea that bookshops were only for wealthy grown-ups, that he’d be dragged out by the ear if he dared to enter.
Professor Lovell smiled when he saw Robin hesitating at the doors.
‘And this is just a shop for the public,’ he said. ‘Wait until you see a college library.’
Inside, the heady wood-dust smell of freshly printed books was overwhelming. If tobacco smelled like this, Robin thought, he’d huff it every day. He stepped towards the closest shelf, hand lifted tentatively towards the books on display, too afraid to touch them – they seemed so new and crisp; their spines were uncracked, their pages smooth and bright. Robin was used to well-worn, waterlogged tomes; even his Classics grammars were decades old. These shiny, freshly bound things seemed like a different class of object, things to be admired from a distance rather than handled and read.
‘Pick one,’ said Professor Lovell. ‘You ought to know the feeling of acquiring your first book.’
Pick one? Just one, of all these treasures? Robin didn’t know the first title from the second, and he was too dazzled by the sheer amount of text to flip through and decide. His eyes alighted on a title: The King’s Own by Frederick Marryat, an author he was, so far, unfamiliar with. But new, he thought, was good.
‘Hm. Marryat. I haven’t read him, but I’m told he’s popular with boys your age.’ Professor Lovell turned the book over in his hands. ‘This one, then? You’re sure?’
Robin nodded. If he didn’t decide now, he knew, he’d never leave. He was like a starved man in a pastry shop, dazzled by his options, but he did not want to try the professor’s patience.
Outside, the professor handed him the brown-paper-wrapped parcel. Robin hugged it to his chest, willing himself not to rip it open until they’d returned home. He thanked Professor Lovell profusely, and stopped only when he noticed this made the professor look somewhat uncomfortable. But then the professor asked him whether it felt good to hold the new book in his hands. Robin enthusiastically agreed and, for the first time he could remember, they traded smiles.
Robin had planned to save The King’s Own until that weekend, when he had a whole afternoon without classes to slowly savour its pages. But Thursday afternoon came, and he found he couldn’t wait. After Mr Felton left, he wolfed down the plate of bread and cheese Mrs Piper had set out and hurried upstairs to the library, where he curled up in his favourite armchair and started to read.
He was immediately enchanted. The King’s Own was a tale of naval exploits; of revenge, daring, and struggle; of ship battles and far-flung travels. His mind drifted to his own voyage from Canton, and he reframed those memories in the context of the novel, imagined himself battling pirates, building rafts, winning medals for courage and valour—
The door creaked open.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Professor Lovell.
Robin glanced up. His mental image of the Royal Navy navigating choppy waters had been so vivid, it took him a moment to remember where he was.
‘Robin,’ Professor Lovell said again, ‘what are you doing?’
Suddenly the library felt very cold; the golden afternoon darkened. Robin followed Professor Lovell’s gaze to the ticking clock above the door. He’d completely forgotten the time. But those hands couldn’t possibly be right, it couldn’t have been three hours since he’d sat down to read.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, still somewhat dazed. He felt like a traveller from far away, plucked from the Indian Ocean and dropped into this dim, chilly study. ‘I didn’t – I lost track of time.’