"C'mon Crawley, get a move on, or we'll miss everything". Matthew's friend and colleague JS Cowan grumbled. 'I am hurrying..." Matthew replied as he looked over his wardrobe. The private gathering they were to attend was in part a welcome back to the college as Matthew had been away for over a year. And he intended to look his best.
The Master of Oxford's Lonsdale College arranged with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Office of Legal Aid to send post grad students and registered lawyers to Afghanistan to aid local NGOs in offering legal advice.
Matthew Crawley took up the offer as he held a position as a research don in the history of law and a part time tutor/lecturer in the evening program. He had accepted the year and a half advisee position in Afghanistan at the urging of his sister Kate who worked with several UK human rights organizations. In other words she guilted him into it.
It had been a dizzying experience full of unfamiliar sights and sensations . Most of it, really, he admitted to himself, had been uneventful with long periods of dull paperwork and filing writs and briefs. But in the quietest of ordinary tasks would arrive the sound of shell explosions and return gun fire that punctuated the air with dust and residue.
Matthew and the other civilian volunteers remained confined in the army compound for their own safety. He rarely left although he had hoped to go and explore the capital of Kabul or visit the historic sites that he glimpsed from the armoured truck that carried them everywhere they needed to go. Bomb threats and sporadic military checks of their facilities for hidden IEDs or other weaponry had also become surprisingly routine.
He felt he done good work aiding organizations like Oxfam International in humanitarian and educational relief. Matthew managed to exchange with another lawyer for the last six months of his sabbatical from college so that he could return temporarily to Oxford and then to spend time researching in Irish and English archives to complete his study of Anglo-Irish relations in the interwar years. This project had been on the back burner for too long and the publisher of the academic press was getting antsy about its completion.
But tonight…tonight he was going to have fun. He hummed somewhat tunelessly as he threw on a pair of khaki trousers and a slate blue shirt …hesitating slightly about whether to put on a tie. He looked over at the man sitting on the divan in his cluttered and slightly musty college rooms. JS Cowan, his mentor and father figure, nodded slightly. He put on a tie and jacket. Matthew, as a teen always too awkward for his lanky frame, was now fit from daily runs around the compound. He decided not to shave and left what Cowan called his vanity stubble neatly trimmed.
"If you keep up these ablutions we're going to be late" Cowan grumbled. This department party officially was to confirm the contract with Old Church St. Design, one of the top firms in the UK or so he was being told by his old college mentor who was (in Matthew's not to be said aloud opinion) droning on about the details of measurements and space management.
He was already anticipating shedding the (monastically sober) demeanor he had maintained in Kabul for some (slightly…but responsibly inebriated) secular enjoyments. "I think you are preparing for some" slight pause for effect and to get Matthew's attention "…female companionship are we" he chuckled "to use the polite term."
Matthew chuckled and gazed at him with a bemused half smile. "Well such companionship" he hesitated over the somewhat obsolete term…but decided he liked it…"was decidedly lacking in the celibate atmosphere of a military compound." He clapped Cowan on the shoulder. "Ready?" He asked cocking his head to one side. "I certainly am."
XX
Mary looked around the space that was about to be transformed into a multimedia center suitable for 21st century meeting rooms with a library readapted to access eBooks and digitized archival materials. Her job was to also ensure that the space maintained this 'digital revolution' within the confines of the traditional gate towers and medieval battlements décor. It had been tricky to mask the technology within the ambiance of a quiet library. But the design, as laid out in the presentation she had made the previous week to the master of the college, had been accepted. She smiled softly to herself….yes this was going to be challenging but fulfilling experience. Given the tumult of her family life recently this work came as a welcome distraction and a way out mentally of her own thoughts about her future. She thought she had made the right decision, both for herself and her family, and that she could handle the both public and private consequences .But now that she was having such success in her professional life… some doubt crept in. She brushed off the thoughts and blamed them on nerves and her natural disposition to have everything in her life orderly and safe.
Tonight, she decided tonight would be just fun. To interact with the Lonsdale faculty and staff in a social setting would be different and less stressful than the hectic work schedule and organizational management meetings they had been maintaining. "Maybe" Mary thought to herself as she dressed (casual but elegant in a mid length skirt and open blouse) " maybe it was time to cut loose." The thought amused her as put on her coat. A room full of near strangers where she could converse and interact without expectation or custom. People who regarded her solely as a managing partner in Old Church St. Design and not as Lady Mary Crawley, heir to a bankrupt estate and betrothed to Ronan Napier, private banker and consultant to the government, in what was already being dubbed by the more trendier mags and websites as the "Second Wedding of the Century."
