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Rosalind or me or both. It was the kind of green-eyed disrespectful flash I had seen often enough in her father, whom she had never known. She was polite to me as she was to everyone, maddeningly polite, but I didn’t begin to understand her. She had not once asked me a question about her father, though she must have known that I had been his closest friend. One day, out of curiosity or provocation, I had tried to talk about him. ‘Did you think that?’ she had said decorously. ‘Oh, I must ask Aunt Meg’ (as she called Margaret, of whom she seemed to be fond). Again, she must have known that Margaret and Roy had never met.
    When, for an instant, Pat engaged his mother-in-law in conversation, Muriel asked a few soft-voiced questions about the autumn theatres. She knew that I wasn’t much interested, and rarely went. Was she being obtuse, or amusing herself? She was abnormally self-possessed and strong-willed, that was all I knew about her. Like a good many other men, I found her – in some inexplicable and irritating fashion – very attractive.
    Just then – we had finished the fish, Azik was smelling his first glass of claret, for which, in spite of his earlier strictures, he had considerable enthusiasm – I heard Pat utter the name of Margaret’s father. Startled, turning away from Muriel, I looked down the table. Pat was smiling at Margaret with something between protectiveness and triumph. His brown eyes were shining: he had his air of doggy confidence, of one who managed to please but wasn’t easily put down.
    ‘Yes,’ he was telling her, ‘he was in better spirits, I’m sure he was.’
    ‘You mean, you’ve seen him?’
    ‘Of course I have, Aunt Meg.’
    It became clear that Pat was telling the truth, which could not invariably be assumed. It also became clear that Austin Davidson had talked with his innocent candour, and that Pat knew everything we knew, and had – certainly to his wife and her mother – passed most of it on. Pat had paid, not one visit, but several: for an instant Margaret looked stupefied, astonished that her father had told us nothing of this. But why should he? He had other visitors besides ourselves, but he didn’t think it relevant to mention them.
    The greater mystery was how Pat had learned that Davidson was in the clinic at all, and how he had got inside the place himself. As for the first, he was one of those natural detectives or intelligence agents, whom I had come across, and been disconcerted by, more than once in my life: and, further, he had always been specially inquisitive about Davidson, and anxious to know him. Not from motives which were entirely pure: Pat was an aspiring painter, and he believed that an eminent art critic, even though retired, must have retained some useful acquaintances. Anyway, insatiably curious and also on the make, Pat had somehow obtained the entrée to Davidson’s bedroom, quite possibly using my name without undue fastidiousness.
    Once there, it was no mystery at all that Davidson had encouraged him to come again. Pat was on the make, he was a busybody, a gossip, often a mischief-maker and several kinds of a liar: but he was also kind. In the presence of the isolated old man, Pat would try to enliven him, using all his resources, which were considerable: for he was more than kind, to many people he was a life-giver. The unfairness was, he had that talent far more highly developed than persons of better character: when I came to think of it, life-givers of Pat’s species had, so far as I had met them, usually been people who wouldn’t pass much of an examination into their moral nature. That had been true of my boyhood friend Jack Cotery, whom in a good many ways Pat resembled. It was probable, I thought, that Pat’s visits were more of a help to Austin Davidson than either Margaret’s or mine.
    ‘You must believe me,’ Pat said to Margaret, ‘he’s looking forward to things now, he’s picking up, you’ll see.’
    ‘I’ve