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married nor even had a girlfriend, as far as Susan could make out. What did he do all day? These weekends, though only occurring annually, were terribly tedious and trying. Last year he had awakened her and Frank by knocking on their bedroom door at three in the morning to complain about a ticking clock in his room.Then there had been the business of the dry-cleaning spray. A splash of olive oil had left a pinpoint spot on the (already not very clean) jacket of Ambrose’s navy blue suit. He had averred that the stain remover Susan had in the cupboard left it untouched, though Susan and Frank could see no mark at all after it had been applied, and insisted on their driving him into Cheltenham for a can of a particular kind of dry-cleaning spray. By then it was after five, and by the time they got there all possible purveyors of the spray were closed till Monday. Ambrose had gone on and on about that stain on his jacket right up to the moment Frank dropped him at Kingham Station on Sunday afternoon.
    The evening passed uneventfully and without any real problems. It was true that Ambrose remarked on the silk trousers she had changed into, saying, on a slightly acrimonious note that reminded Susan of Auntie Bee, what a pity it was that skirts would soon go entirely out of fashion. He left most of his pheasant en casserole, though without comment. Susan and Frank lay awake a long while, occasionally giggling and expecting a knock at their door. None came.The silence of the night was broken only by the melancholy hooting of owls.
    A fine morning, though not hot, and Oxford particularly beautiful in the sunshine. When they had parked the car they strolled up the High Street and had coffee in a small select café, outside which tables and chairs stood on the wide pavement. The Ribbons, however, went inside, where it was rather gloomy and dim. Ambrose deplored the adoption by English restaurants of Continental habits totally unsuited to what he called “our island climate.” He talked about his mother and the gap in the company her absence caused, interrupting his own monologue to ask in a querulous tone why Susan kept looking at her watch.
    “We have no particular engagement, do we? We are, as might be said, free as air?”
    “Oh, quite,” Susan said. “That’s exactly right.”
    But it wasn’t
exactly
right. She resisted glancing at her watch again. There was, after all, a clock on the café wall. So long as they were out of there by ten to eleven they would be in plenty of time. She didn’t want to spend half the morning standing in a queue. Ambrose went on talking about Auntie Bee, how she’d lived in a slower-paced and more gracious past, how, as much as he missed her, he was glad for her sake she hadn’t survived past the dawn of this new, and doubtless worse, millennium.
    They left at eight minutes to eleven and walked to Blackwell’s. Ambrose was in his element in bookshops, which was partly, though only partly, why they had come.The signing was advertised in the window and inside, though there was no voice on a public-address system urging customers to buy and get the author’s signature. And there he was, sitting at the end of a table loaded with copies of his new book. A queue there was, but only a short one. Susan calculated that by the time she had selected her copy of
Demogorgon
and paid for it she would be no farther back than eighth in line, a matter of waiting ten minutes.
    She hadn’t counted on Ambrose’s extraordinary reaction. Of course, she was well aware—he had seen to that—of his antipathy to the works of Kingston Marle, but not that it should take such a violent form. At first, the author and perhaps also the author’s name, had been hidden from Ambrose’s view by her own back and Frank’s and the press of people around him. But as that crowd for some reason melted away, Frank turned around to say a word to his cousin and she went to collect the book she had reserved, Kingston Marle