But he does not. On Sunday morning he drives to the empty campus and lets himself into the department office. From the filing cabinet he extracts Melanie Isaacs’s enrolment card and copies down her personal details: home address, Cape Town address, telephone number. He dials the number. A woman’s voice answers. ‘Melanie?’ ‘I’ll call her. Who is speaking?’ ‘Tell her, David Lurie.’ Melanie – melody: a meretricious rhyme. Not a good name for her. Shift the accent. Meláni: the dark one. ‘Hello?’ In the one word he hears all her uncertainty. Too young. She will not know how to deal with him; he ought to let her go. But he is in the grip of something. Beauty’s rose: the poem drives straight as an arrow. She does not own herself; perhaps he does not own himself either. ‘I thought you might like to go out to lunch,’ he says. ‘I’ll pick you up at, shall we say, twelve.’ There is still time for her to tell a lie, wriggle out. But she is too confused, and the moment passes.
