“Well, it’ll probably be a lot better for you next year.” Farrell tried conscientiously to say something useful. “As you said, once you’ve got tenure, they’ll let you alone. Let you write your own ticket, pretty much.”

“A ticket to where?” The familiar sweet, shrewd gaze returned to Farrell, and he saw that the thin scar under Ben’s eye was standing up, seeming to stir like a muscle. Ben said, “I don’t think it is going to get any better. The boredom I could handle, but I hate feeling so contemptuous. I hate feeling myself getting mean. Joe, it’s just not what I had in mind.”

“I didn’t know,” Farrell said. “We never talked much about that part of your life, you never wrote how things were. I thought it was what you wanted, committees and all.”

“Oh, wanting’s different.” Ben gripped Farrell’s forearm, not hard, but the urgency in the touch set the bones cringing together. “I did get what I wanted, and I probably even still want it, for all I know these days. But it isn’t what I had in mind.” He peered at Farrell, squinting with the need to make him see, as though he were tutoring him in chemistry once again. “It isn’t what I had in mind.”

A door yawped and sighed, and they both turned to see a tall, naked, white-haired man enter and stand peering at them down the pool. He had a massive, grainy face that reminded Farrell of the bowls of stone grapes and bananas in the gardens of Scotia Street. Ben said abruptly, “Go do a couple of laps, I want to watch you.”

The white-haired man cried out in the thickest Scots accent that Farrell had ever heard, “Now by the rood, ‘tis in sooth the guid laird Egil Eyvindsson of Narroway!” Farrell walked to the near end and went in. He dived too deep and came up off-balance, and it took him nearly a length to find his stroke. Each time he turned his head, he saw the whitehaired man striding toward Ben, one arm out in greeting, skidding alarmingly on the tiles, but never deigning to grab for balance, so that he progressed at an increasingly rapid lurch. For all that, a kind of overripe stateliness steamed about him, and he bawled nobly in a voice like wooden wheels on a wet wooden bridge, “Egil, hail! Och, I was but seeking ye the noo! News o’ Duke Claudio!”