Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

The time was December, when it would be dark by four-thirty, the fields
were sodden, and the weather was misty.  At my school, at the end of the
winter term, any football games that still needed to be played were
played in the mornings.  The narrator was walking back from an
expedition to the High Street when Widmerpool loomed up through the
dusk.  "Widmerpool was known to go voluntarily 'for a run' by himself
every afternoon. This was his return from trotting across the plough in
drizzle that had been falling since early school."

The overall sense must be that exercise was no longer compulsory Monday
to Friday.  The road was empty because passengers didn't go out if they
could avoid it.  The year was early 1920s, and there wouldn't have been
much motor traffic there at that time (in Eton, a village on a road to
nowhere across the Thames from Windsor).

I suggest that "no longer contestable" means "out of the question".
Unless you are Widmerpool, that is; and the fact that Widmerpool chooses
to run in such conditions tells you something of his character.