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relationship somehow covered and accounted for everything. Of course Austin was a fond proud father. Yet was Garth really so remarkable? Austin feared his son’s judgment, but that was another thing. There were indeed many other things. He was grateful to Ludwig too because Ludwig, while being friendly, loyal and discreet, could make neither head nor tail of the Dorina business, and did not, as everyone else did, pretend to understand it better than Austin did himself.
    What did I do with that photo of Betty, he thought, as he lifted his steel-rimmed specs out of a pool of beer. Austin was vain about his appearance and resented the glasses, which were new-comers in his life. He began to ferret about in Miss Waterhouse’s carrier bag. Then he remembered that he had torn the photo up and thrown it away. Why had he done that? Why was he always doing things that he didn’t mean to or want to? The pub was closing and he would have to go back to the flat. He would take some aspirins and lie down. But then the demon asthma would come and bind his breast in a hoop of steel. It had been his constant companion, forbidding rest, ever since the accident with the gas. And afternoon repose was hell anyway, as he knew from terrible Saturdays and Sundays when his body and his mind ached with twitching boredom and fatigue and fear. Quietness came to him now only when he was unconscious.
    Suppose he were to go to the National Gallery. Would Titian or Rembrandt or Piero work a wonder for him, as they had once done? No. All books, even the greatest, became exhausted if read often enough and all pictures lose their power to charm. Only youth preserves some illusion of radiance because the ability to be surprised has not yet worn away. And when he felt wistfully that his own life had once had the clarity of art, he was merely remembering his boyhood, the bright time before he fell down that rivulet of stone while the fat boy laughed and laughed.
    When he was ten he had had to learn to write with his left hand. Every nerve of his being resisted this. He had fallen through the looking-glass and could never get back. Even now when he was tired he formed his letters the wrong way round and the old weak penetrating feeling of impotence swept over him again. His Quaker parents had told him to make of his physical disability a spiritual advantage but he could not and would not. For him the Inner Light was early quenched. He detested his parents’ complacent seriousness. But he had never made it out of their rotten milieu like Matthew had.
    That was all long ago and even poor Bet was dead long since and the miseries she had caused him were spectres which the years had wasted and the fat boy in the football jersey was an elderly Buddha, an ambassador, a ‘Sir’. ‘Oh, are you Sir Matthew’s brother?’ people would say with ill-concealed amaze. Let Matthew now stay away from him for ever, let him end his days in an eastern monastery, as he once said he would, and let the world know him no more. Indeed, Austin had already come to believe that Matthew was dead, for only so could his own heart be at rest.

‘Grace Leferrier. It’s a nice name. Yes, very nice.’
    â€˜You aren’t too sorry about Sebastian Odmore?’
    â€˜I knew Gracie would never marry Sebastian.’
    â€˜I think you’re making the best of a —’
    â€˜No, I’m not, Pinkie. I think it’s lovely.’
    George and Clara Tisbourne were drinking after-luncheon coffee in their tiny dining-room. George was a civil servant working on Millbank and came home to lunch most days. The rain had stopped and a faint steam arose from the wet cement in the tiny garden-yard. There was a lake about the drain which was blocked again.
    â€˜And it all happened this morning?’
    â€˜Yes, about eleven o’clock, Gracie said.’
    â€˜Was she calm?’
    â€˜No. She pretended to be. But she was all of a tremble. So am I.