I knew him by sight for three terms before we exchanged a word.
A private workspace had been made in a corner of the dissecting-room by taking a door off a cupboard and installing a bench. Baxter usually sat there, preparing and examining slide sections and making rapid notes, and here his big face, stout body and thick limbs gave him a dwarfish look. Sometimes he ran out to raid the tank of disinfectant where brains were heaped like cauliflowers, and as he passed other people you saw he was a whole head taller than most, but he kept as far from others as possible, being desperately shy. Despite the ogreish body he had the wide hopeful eyes, snub nose and mournful mouth of an anxious infant, with a brow corrugated by three deep permanent wrinkles. In the morning his coarse brown hair was oiled and combed flat on each side of a centre parting, but as the day wore on spiky tufts of it rose behind his ears, and by mid afternoon his scalp was as shaggy as a bear’s pelt. His clothes were of expensive grey cloth, quietly fashionable and beautifully tailored to make his odd figure appear as conventional as possible, yet I felt he would look more natural in the baggy pants and turban of a pantomime Turk.