The Le Val email server had been getting bombarded with a lot of unsolicited mail recently. Offers of cut-price Viagra, phishing scams of one kind or another, and so many messages from prospective Russian brides called Tatiyana or Olga or Mayya, invariably 28 years old and offering to send images of themselves that Ben had been starting to wonder what Tuesday was getting up to online. He was getting almost as fast with the delete button as he was with a pistol.
Working his way through the pile, Ben came across an undeleted message from somebody called Seraphina Lewis. He glanced at the name for a fraction of a second before his finger gave its reflex twitch and got rid of it. Nice try, he thought. An unusual name. Intended to draw attention, maybe, as the scammers and phishers became more sophisticated in their techniques. The part of Ben’s mind that still recalled anything from his theology studies from two decades earlier, before he’d dropped that future life to join the army and then the SAS, flashed up the name Seraphina as being the feminine derivative of the biblical Seraphim from the Book of Isaiah. Why he still retained such information inside his head, he had no idea. The Seraphim were the fiery-winged beings, high-placed in angelic hierarchy, who fluttered around the throne of God in heaven. Maybe the oblique reference to ‘the fiery ones’ was supposed to convey a subconscious image of hot, burning passion. Or maybe it was meant to project a sense of purity and innocence to catch the unwary recipient and lure them to read more.
Either way, by the time those thoughts had flickered through his mind at the speed of light, the email was already in the trash and he was turning his attention back to his paperwork.
But then Ben hesitated. Something else was unusual about the message. More than the name, it was the email address itself. He could see it still imprinted like a ghost image on his retinas: the suffix @chch.ox.ac.uk. The official domain name for Christ Church, Oxford.
Ben’s old college. Which, as strange as that seemed, meant that the email was genuine, and meant for him. Ben hesitated a moment longer, then clicked open the trash folder and saw the unread message there at the top, above the collection of Viagra ads and Tatiyanas and Mayyas waiting to be permanently binned.
‘Okay, Seraphina,’ he muttered to himself, ‘let’s see what it is you wanted.’ Donations to help restore some crumbling part of the college’s architecture, no doubt, or to pay for de-moling the Dean’s private garden or restore the paintings in the art gallery that nobody ever looked at anyway. He clicked again, and the message opened.
Strange indeed, but stranger things had happened in his life.
Chapter 4
The message wasn’t the begging letter he’d expected. Rather, it was a month-old invitation to all former members of the ‘House’, that being the rather grand name by which his old college Christ Church colloquially referred to itself, studiously avoiding the word ‘college’ as a way to elevate itself above its smaller, less prestigious siblings. None of which could boast having a city cathedral as their college chapel, for instance, or thirteen British prime ministers and at least one English monarch among their illustrious alumni.
Somewhere close to the bottom of that list, way down there beneath the King Edward the Seconds and the William Gladstones and the Anthony Edens and the Lewis Carrolls — lower still than the likes of the infamous archbishop-turned-pirate Lancelot Blackburne and the German cokehead aristocrat Gottfried Von Bismarck — was the very little-known name of a certain Benedict Hope, Major, British Armed Forces, Ret. Though apparently not so little known as to be excluded from the invitation that had now unexpectedly, and slightly belatedly, landed in Ben’s lap. The hard copy of the letter that the college had presumably sent out ahead of the email must have ended up in the Le Val shredder weeks ago, unopened, along with a ton of junk.
With mixed feelings, he read on.
Seraphina Lewis, as it turned out, was the new college administrator tasked with tracking down and reaching out to old House members. Christ Church was a bit like the SAS: once you were in, you were in for life. Even if you left there under the darkest of clouds. Even if you had almost set fire to the place on at least one occasion, and in a separate incident hurled down three flights of stairs a fridge containing a roast pheasant and a bottle of expensive champagne belonging to the son of the Italian president, almost causing an international flap in the process. Such trifling matters seemingly were omitted from House records, in a spirit of forgive and forget.
The invitation read:
Dear Old Member,
This is to remind you that you are cordially invited to attend a special Easter reunion for all Christ Church Alumni, to be held on Wednesday, 12 April. The event will include refreshments in the Deanery Garden and a celebration dinner in the Great Hall (gowns to be worn). In addition, this year we are delighted to invite you to a private recital in the college chapel by Old Member and former Christ Church Organ Scholar Nicholas Hawthorne, who since leaving the House has gone on to become an internationally acclaimed classical recording artist. Nicholas will be performing works by William Byrd, Olivier Messiaen and Johann Sebastian Bach on the cathedral’s magnificent Rieger organ. I hope you will be able to attend, and warmly look forward to welcoming you back in person to Christ Church for this very special event. Accommodation will be available within college at no extra cost for Old Members and spouses.
Warmly, Seraphina Lewis, Christ Church (1993)
Development and Alumni Office
R.S.V.P. to seraphina.lewis@chch.ox.ac.uk
Ben stubbed out his cigarette, lit a fresh one, and leaned back from the desk to think. The date of the event was only three days from now, the email having sat ignored in the spam folder all these weeks. His automatic inclination was to dismiss the matter without a second thought and not even bother replying. He hadn’t been back to Oxford since the brief time he and his then-fiancée Brooke Marcel had rented a house in Jericho, in the west of the city. Much had happened since then. Too much.
But then Ben thought about it some more, and felt himself slowly softening to the idea of attending the reunion. Not all his memories were bad ones. He remembered a moonlit summer’s night many years ago, sitting under the ancient cloister arches near Old Library with Michaela, the two of them listening to the strains of one of Nick Hawthorne’s late-night organ practice sessions emanating from where the cathedral nave adjoined the far corner of the cloister.
Though Nick had been the eldest by some margin, he’d been a key member of the ‘gang of four’: him, Ben, Michaela and Simeon. They’d all met during Ben’s second year at Christ Church, which would turn out to be his last, and become good friends. When you could drag Nick away from his music, he was fun company, knew the wickedest jokes and could drink real ale like it was going out of style.
Simeon Arundel had been a very different personality. Like Ben, he’d studied theology. Unlike Ben, he’d been heavily committed long-term to the subject and would go on to see it through to the end by being ordained as a vicar. Michaela Ward had been a first-year student of PPE, Oxford’s abbreviation for Philosophy, Politics and Economics. And she’d been Ben’s first serious girlfriend, though the relationship hadn’t lasted long. Following their break-up, Ben’s life had reached an unhappy point where he terminated his studies and left university. Then, in the wake of Ben’s dramatic departure, the friendship that had always existed between Michaela and Simeon suddenly deepened and they’d got together, married and settled in a village not too far from Oxford. As it turned out, those two had been meant for each other.