Read The Report for Free Online Page A

the opposite bank, Vane some way down; and a minute earlier, Smith and Headley had trudged past, heading to a beat upstream, where Smith would no doubt stir up the silt and weeds by wading, a regular habit of his, although it was against the river rules.
    People can move on land and through air and even reach the depths of the ocean, Laurie marveled. What they can’t do—inhibited by nature and temperament—is find a good lie and stay there. Though he’d tried, God knows.
    A minute later, Laurie’s line went taut, and after a good race upstream and down, he had a fifteen-inch rainbow in the shallows. While he was reeling it in, a second, larger rainbow nipped at the fly. He looked toward the clubhouse with disgust. “Why don’t we just scoop them out with nets?” he said aloud.
    On the opposite bank, Clarkson turned, but Laurie lowered his head over the fish. He would speak to Mortimer, the river keeper, at lunch.
    As he cast again, he reflected on the history he’d studied, a sort of general sweep. Egypt, Rome, the roiling Dark Ages. The Renaissance, of course, then the Industrial Revolution, and the wars. He saw paintings and shadows and costumes; himself, too, in the libraries of Eton and Magdalen, studying the books that had informed him of these things. The review lasted a minute or two, time enough for him to score another trout and cast again, and afterward he decided crowded places were a nuisance.
    He rubbed a hand across his eyes. He was thinking of crowds because of Barber. He might have been happy never to have discussed them again, until the boy showed up on his doorstep. Was that true? He couldn’t be sure. He was aware of an eagerness seeping in, a desire to talk about the incident that made him uncomfortable.
    He started back to the clubhouse. Crowds, as far as he could tell, had rarely done any good. Where they did succeed, and perhaps the rural riots in Wales were an example, they offered only temporary support for a dying way of life. Crowds were blinded by their credulity, he thought, their exaggeration of good and evil. Yes. He would propose the idea later and hoped the subject might just make his friend mighty William forget his bloody grandchildren for one afternoon.
    Lunch was grilled salmon with a maple glaze, and the group ate outside under a white tent on the lawn. Most of the older members disliked eating outside, but the younger ones insisted on it, so this season the club’s twenty-four members had voted to hold several of these “garden lunches” as an experiment. Laurie did not oppose eating outside, but he found several of the younger members insufferable in their determination. Why join a club and then immediately try to change it? For nearly one hundred and fifty years, the members had eaten in the oak-paneled grill room, the sun reduced to liquid through its lead glass windows. He had a dozen memories for every table: he’d dined in the corner with Andrew when he’d come down from Oxford; he’d celebrated there with friends when he became chief metropolitan magistrate; the whole place had been filled for his retirement party. He knew what the room felt like dressed for morning tea and how it behaved when cigar smoke hung in folds from the rafters at midnight.
    Now the club owned a bright white tent with poles of questionable strength. It came from an American company, and the staff were still assembling various parts when the salad course arrived. Lanyards thrashed about in the wind, putting Laurie in mind of the coast, and a piece of the tent at Laurie’s end—a door-shaped bit with clear plastic parts that were meant to suggest windows, he feared—flapped about like a leeward sail. The younger members looked worried, their experiment failing, while many of the older members were too busy trying to align their white folding chairs on the uneven grass or dodging bees to notice much of anything.
    Laurie turned to mighty William, engaged in spearing a tomato. “Crowds,