It started to snow as Harriet was writing the last paragraph. Looking up she saw the flakes tumbling out of a sullen, pewter-grey sky, swirling and chasing each other, drifting into the branched arms of the trees. With a yelp of excitement she put down her pen and ran to the window. The flakes were small and compact. It was going to settle. Now they were belting down, and suddenly the towers of Oxford were encapsulated in a flurry of white flakes, as though someone had violently shaken a snow scene in a glass ball.

She went back to her essay, copying out the last two sentences with a flourish, then she wrote her name at the top of the first page: Harriet Poole, carefully closing up the Os, because she’d read somewhere that it was a sign of weak character to leave them open.

She had got up at six to finish her essay, having spent all week re-writing it. Anything to avoid the humiliation of last week’s tutorial. Her tutor, Theo Dutton, who chain-smoked and showed no mercy, was famous for his blistering invective. When she had finished reading out last week’s essay he had asked her three questions which entirely exposed the shallowness of her argument, then, tearing up the pages with long nicotined fingers, had dropped them disdainfully into the waste paper basket.

‘That was junk,’ he had said in his dry, precise voice, ‘you merely copied out other people’s ideas with varying degrees of accuracy. Read Shakespeare rather than books about Shakespeare. Look into your heart and write. You’re trying too hard; relax; enjoy what you read or dislike it, but don’t deaden it on paper.’

Her eyes had filled with tears. She had worked very hard. ‘You’re too sensitive, Harriet,’ he had said, ‘we’ll have to raise your threshold of pain, won’t we? A large dose of bullying each week until you build up an immunity.’