The Malcontents by C.P. Snow

In the mild January night, a young man was waiting outside his father's house. A single bell rang, and kept on ringing, from the cathedral tower. The young man, whose name was Stephen Freer, was used to bells, having lived since he was a child in that house close by. Six fifteen on a Saturday evening: the spoken evensong without a choir: not paying attention, concentrated on his own thoughts, he watched a couple of figures, and then another, move towards the radiant porch.

Stephen moved down the lane and stopped at the bollards at the end. The lane, cut off from traffic, Georgian houses on the further side, was as near a precinct as the cathedral could provide: but in fact the cathedral had until recently been only a parish church, promoted when the town itself was promoted, and the lane was a relic, piously preserved by local antiquarians, Stephen's father among them, of the old eighteenth-century town.