He told her, in turn, about his disciplinarian mother, the intellectual tundra of his hamlet in Hampshire, the stamina reviewing for his sixth form exams inspired by the idea of Cambridge—the yearning to be among others like him—only to be tossed into the Trinity fountain his first week there. It was unfailingly worth it, he said, if only because of those first nights reading Eclogues, and that thing telling him, not intellectually, but physically, carnally, This is who you are. “You can’t ever walk away from that,” he said. “You have to enshrine it. I really believe that.”
