It was only after he had driven home, and had drunk three nightcap scotches with his father, then gone to his old room and lain on the bed fully dressed and considered what she had told him, that he grasped the extent of her achievement. Seventeen lovers in eleven years. Lieutenant Colonel Beard had had all the excitement and danger he could stand by the age of thirty-three. Angela had to have hers. Her lovers were her desert campaign against Rommel, her D-Day and her Berlin. Without them, she had told Michael from her hospital pillows, she would have hated herself and gone mad. But she hated herself anyway for what she thought she had done to her only child. He went back to the hospital the next day, and while she sweatily clung to his hand, told her that his childhood had been the happiest and most secure imaginable, that he had never felt neglected or doubted her love or eaten so well and that he was proud of what he called her appetite for life and hoped to inherit it. It was the first time he had given a speech. These half- and quarter-truths were the best words he had ever spoken. Six weeks later she was dead. Naturally, her love life was a closed subject between father and son, but for years afterwards Michael could not drive through Chelmsford or the surrounding villages without wondering whether this or that old fellow tottering along the pavement or slumped near a bus stop was one of the seventeen.

By the standards of the day, he was a precocious lad when he arrived at Oxford. He had already made love to two girls, he owned a car, a split-screen Morris Minor which he kept in a lock-up off the Cowley Road, and he had an allowance from his father that was far in excess of what other grammar-school boys received. He was clever, sociable, opinionated, unimpressed by, and even a little scornful of, boys from famous schools. He was one of those types, infuriating and indispensable, who was at the front of every queue, had tickets to key events in London, within days knew strategically important people and all kinds of shortcuts, social as well as topographic. He looked much older than eighteen, and was hard-working, organised, tidy, and actually owned and used a desk diary. People sought him out because he could repair radios and record players and kept a soldering iron in his room. For these services, of course, he never asked for money, but he had the knack of calling in favours.

Within weeks of settling in, he had a girlfriend, a 'bad' girl from Oxford High called Susan Doty. Other boys studying maths and physics tended to be closed, mousey types. Outside lab work and tutorials, Michael kept well clear of them, and he also avoided the arty sort of people – they intimidated him with literary references he did not understand. He preferred instead the engineers, who gave him access to the workshops, and the geographers, zoologists and anthropologists, especially the ones who had already done fieldwork in strange places. Beard knew many people but had no close friends. He was never exactly popular, but he was well known, talked about, useful to people and faintly despised.

At the end of his second year, while he was trying to accustom himself to the idea that his mother would soon die, Beard overheard someone in a pub refer to a student at Lady Margaret Hall called Maisie Farmer as a 'dirty girl'. The phrase was used approvingly, as though it were a well-established category of some clinical accuracy. Her bucolic name in this connection intrigued him. He thought of a generous strapping lass, manure-streaked, astride a tractor, and then did not think about her again. The term ended, he went home, his mother died and the summer was lost to grief and boredom, and numbing, inarticulate silences at home with his father. They had never discussed feelings, and had no language for them now. When he saw from the house his father at the bottom of the garden, examining the roses too closely, he was embarrassed, no, horrified, to realise from the tremors along his shoulders that he was weeping. It did not occur to Michael to go out to him. Knowing about his mother's lovers, and not knowing whether his father knew (he guessed he did not), was another impossible obstacle.

He returned to Oxford in September and took a third-floor room in Park Town, a down-at-heel mid-Victorian crescent arranged around a central garden. His walk to the physics buildings each day took him past the front gates of the dirty girl's college by the narrow passageway to University Parks. One morning, on impulse, he wandered in and established at the porter's lodge that a student with the name of Maisie Farmer indeed existed. He discovered later in the same week that she was in her third year, doing English, but he did not let that put him off. For a day or two he wondered about her, and then work and other matters took over and he forgot all about her again, and it was not until late October that a friend introduced him to her and another girl outside the Museum of Natural History.

She was not as he had imagined and at first he was disappointed. She was small, almost frail, intensely pretty, with dark eyes and scant eyebrows and a musical voice with a surprising accent, a hint of cockney, which was unusual in a woman at university in those days. When, in answer to her question, he told her what his subject was, her face went blank and soon she walked on with her friend. He bumped into her alone two days later and asked her to come for a drink and she said no, and said it immediately, before he had quite finished his sentence. It was a measure of Beard's self-confidence that he was surprised. But what did she see in front of her? A stout fellow with an accountant's look and an earnest manner, wearing a tie (in 1967!), with short hair side-parted and, the damning detail, a pen clipped into the breast pocket of his jacket. And he was studying science, a non-subject for fools. She said goodbye politely enough and went on her way, but Beard walked after her and asked if she was free the next day, or the day after that, or at the weekend. No, no, and no. Then he said brightly, 'How about ever?' and she laughed pleasantly, genuinely amused by his persistence, and seemed on the point of changing her mind. But she said, 'There's always never. Can you make never?' to which he replied, 'I'm not free,' and she laughed again and made a sweet little mock punch to his lapel with a child's-sized fist and walked off, leaving him with the impression that he still had a chance, that she had a sense of humour, that he might wear her down.

He did. He researched her. Someone told him she had a special interest in John Milton. It did not take long to discover the century to which this man belonged. A third-year literature student in his college who owed him a favour (procuring tickets to a Cream concert) gave him an hour on Milton, what to read, what to think. He read Comus and was astounded by its silliness. He read through Lycidas, Samson Agonistes and Il Penseroso – stilted and rather prissy in parts, he thought. He fared better with Paradise Lost and, like many before him, preferred Satan's party to God's. He, Beard that is, memorised passages that appeared to him intelligent and especially sonorous. He read a biography, and four essays he had been told were pivotal. The reading took him one long week. He came close to being thrown out of an antiquarian bookshop in the Turl when he casually asked for a first edition of Paradise Lost. He tracked down a kindly tutor who knew about buying old books and confided to him that he wanted to impress a girl with a certain kind of present, and was directed to a bookshop in Covent Garden where he spent half a term's money on an eighteenth-century edition of Areopagitica. When he speed-read it on the train back to Oxford, one of the pages cracked in two. He repaired it with Sellotape.

Then, naturally enough, he bumped into her again, this time by the gates of her college, where he had been waiting for two and a half hours. He asked if he could at least walk with her across the Parks. She didn't say no. She was wearing an army-surplus greatcoat over a yellow cardigan and black pleated skirt and patent-leather shoes with strange silver buckles. She was even more beautiful than he had thought. As they went along he politely enquired about her work and she explained, as though to a village idiot, that she was writing about Milton, a well-known English poet of the seventeenth century. He asked her to be more precise about her essay. She was. He ventured an informed opinion. Surprised, she spoke at greater length. To elucidate some point of hers, he quoted the lines 'from morn / To noon he fell', and she breathily completed them, 'from noon to dewy eve'. Making sure to keep his tone tentative, he spoke of Milton's childhood, and then of the Civil War. There were things she did not know and was interested to learn. She knew little of the poet's life, and, amazingly, it seemed that it was not part of her studies, to consider the circumstances of his times. Beard steered her back onto familiar ground. They quoted more of their favourite lines. He asked her which scholars she had read. He had read some of them too, and gently proved it. He had glanced over a bibliography, and his conversation far outran his reading. She disliked Comus even more than he did, so he ventured a mild defence and allowed himself to be demolished.