She told herself it was a grandson.
That is what she said out loud, in an empty basement, in the voice of a sensible person: it's a grandson. Families come back to colleges. There are portraits in the hall of four generations of the same nose. There is a boy in her year whose great-grandfather is on a war memorial eleven feet from where she eats her lunch.
It is a grandson, and you are twenty, and you have been alone in a basement for nine days.
She found the third one on the Monday, and it was not a grandson, because it was in colour.
St Cuthbert's College Historical Society, Michaelmas 1974. Fourteen people on a lawn. The photograph had gone the particular orange that 1970s colour film goes, and there were three moustaches in it that should have been prosecuted, and standing at the back on the left with his hands in his pockets was a young man of about twenty-one with his chin down, looking very slightly to the left of the lens.
Same face.
Not similar. Not a family resemblance. There is a thing that happens when you look at two photographs of the same person taken seventy years apart, which is that your eye keeps trying to make it be two people and cannot, and Selena sat in a cold basement with three photographs in front of her and felt the back of her neck go.
She was extremely rigorous about it, because that is who she was.
She spent four days on it, in her own time, at night, because Miss Gale had told her that the boxes were to be done in order and Selena had discovered that she was a person who did what she was told about that sort of thing.
1901. No name on the back. The rowing eight of 1901 was recorded in the club book — she found it in box eleven — and the names were listed, and there were nine of them, and one of them was C. Sinclair.
1938. The photograph had a caption glued to the reverse in a different hand. Boat Club, Trinity Term. No names.
1974. Nothing.
She went at it from the other end. College registers are public and the library has them going back to 1600, and Selena Hart spent a Saturday she was supposed to spend sleeping working through them with a pencil.
Sinclair, C. E. — matriculated 1899, went down 1902.
Sinclair, A. — matriculated 1901, went down 1902.
Nothing in 1938 under Sinclair. There was, however, a Vane, C. who matriculated in 1936 and went down in 1939.
Nothing in 1974 under Sinclair either. There was a Casper Ellis, 1972 to 1975.
Selena looked at the three names on the pad in front of her for a long time.
Then she wrote, underneath, in block capitals, and drew a box round it:
THREE YEARS. ALL OF THEM. NONE OF THEM STAYED FOUR.