Oxford, the city of Lucas’s unrealized university ambition, is both a hoped-for destination and a place where that hope is measured against reality. Lucas and Barbara assume he will win a place there, but he attends the University of Warwick instead; later, when his twin sister Rowena gains a place at Hertford College, Oxford becomes the setting for his sharpest confrontation with the difference between his expected future and hers.

The imagined university and the failed expectation

Oxford first matters to Lucas as the university he believes he is likely to attend. He and Barbara have been warned that admission is fiercely competitive, yet neither takes the warning seriously. Barbara’s confidence rests on a habit of interpreting his life as proof of exceptional ability: a school-play performance makes him seem to her better than Laurence Olivier, and a length swum in a hotel pool suggests, in her eyes, the next Mark Spitz. Even at difficult parent-teacher meetings, she emphasizes praise and explains away criticism as a consequence of teachers recognizing how clever he is. Her faith helps make Oxford seem not merely possible but almost assured.

The contrast with the University of Warwick gives that expectation a material form. Warwick is a young institution without Oxford’s traditional associations: Lucas will eat in a cafeteria, and Barbara is unsettled by the prospect of queuing with a tray. The difference is not only architectural or practical. For mother and son, Oxford had represented the achievement they presumed would follow from his promise; Warwick is where he must live after that presumption fails. The disappointment is intensified by the ordinary details of student life, which make the change feel less like an abstract reversal than a new, less celebrated reality.

Rowena’s place and Lucas’s response

The news that Rowena has gained a place to read English at Hertford College, Oxford turns that private disappointment into sibling comparison. Lucas hears the news from his father while sitting on a narrow single bed in his small room at Warwick. The room’s blond-wood desk and Anglepoise lamp frame his immediate response: he wants to smash the place up. The physical setting registers how trapped and diminished he feels at the moment when his younger twin appears to have reached the destination he did not.

His anger fixes on the apparent injustice of the reversal. Rowena, whom he associates with refusing foods such as potato, custard, pastry, and gravy, has been admitted before she is eighteen; Lucas, who had expected success for himself, is left asking why she should have it. The scene makes Oxford more than a prestigious institution in his mind. It becomes the measure by which he judges his own position and the comparison that sharpens resentment between the twins. The admission belongs to Rowena, but its emotional consequence falls heavily on Lucas.

A return as driver, not candidate

Later, Lucas travels to Oxford because Rowena is having a party. He is not returning as a student or as someone whose own academic future has been restored. Instead, he is driving Elise, who responds enthusiastically when he says he is meant to go there and asks for more details after he explains that the party is Rowena’s. Her eagerness turns the journey into a social excursion, while Lucas’s role is initially practical: he is the person with the car who can take her.

As they cross the bridge over the Cherwell and continue onto the High Street, the city becomes a route through which Lucas must carry an uncomfortable mixture of family and personal history. At the Randolph, Elise takes charge of choosing somewhere to eat, proposing its grill room before they go on to find the party. Oxford is thus presented through movement and decisions—crossing the river, reaching the High Street, stopping for a meal—rather than through a description of its famous architecture or academic life. Its significance comes from what the visit brings into contact: Rowena’s student world, Elise’s confidence, and Lucas’s awareness that he is an outsider to the social and intellectual setting he once expected to enter.

The party and the meaning of exclusion

At Rowena’s party, Lucas feels inferior to the people around him, whether he measures himself against them academically or socially. He thinks he is not clever enough, cool enough, or strange enough to belong. Rowena is pleasant but distracted and seems surprised that he has come. He explains his presence by saying he wanted to take the car out, an excuse that avoids saying what the visit means to him or how much he wants recognition from his sister.

Her attention soon turns elsewhere: she asks whether he knows Penny, a third-year biochemistry student at St Hilda’s who plays the harp and enjoys ancient languages, especially Sanskrit. Lucas and Penny exchange a few polite questions before drifting apart. The brief encounter gives his feeling of exclusion a small, concrete shape: he can participate in conversation, but the exchange produces no connection. Oxford’s social world is not shown as a single closed group so much as a succession of people and interests against which Lucas measures himself and comes up short.

Across these scenes, Oxford holds together anticipation, reversal, and return. It is the university Lucas and Barbara treated as the likely reward for his promise; it is the place Rowena reaches instead; and it is the setting where Lucas encounters her new life from the position of a visitor. His journey there does not erase his disappointment. By the time he reaches the party, the city’s promise has become a comparison he cannot escape.