This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

About the Author

Julian Symons was born in 1912 in London. He was the younger brother, and later biographer, of the writer A.J.A. Symons.

Aged twenty five, he founded a poetry magazine which he edited for a short time, before turning to crime writing. This was not to be his only interest, however, as in his eighty-two years he produced an enormously varied body of work. Social and military history, biography and criticism were all subjects he touched upon with remarkable success, and held a distinguished reputation in each field. Nonetheless, it is primarily for his crime writing that he is remembered. His novels were consistently highly individual and expertly crafted, raising him above other crime writers of his day.

Symons commenced World War II as a recognised conscientious objector, but nevertheless ended up serving in the Royal Armoured Corps from 1942 until 1944, when he was invalided out. A period as an advertising copywriter followed, but was soon abandoned in favour of full time writing. Many prizes came his way as a result, including two Edgar Awards and in 1982 he received the accolade of being named as Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America – an honour accorded to only three other English writers before him: Graham Greene, Eric Ambler and Daphne Du Maurier. Symons then succeeded Agatha Christie as the president of Britain’s Detection Club, a position he held from 1976 to 1985, and in 1990 he was awarded the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the British Crime Writers for his lifetime’s achievement in crime fiction.

He published over thirty crime novels and story collections between 1945 and 1994; with the works combining different elements of the classic detective story and modern crime novel, but with a clear leaning toward the latter, especially situations where ordinary people get drawn into extraordinary series of events – a trait he shared with Eric Ambler. He also wrote two modern-day Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In A Three Pipe Problem the detective was ‘... a television actor, Sheridan Hayes, who wears the mask of Sherlock Holmes and assumes his character’. Several of Julian Symons’ works have been filmed for television.

Julian Symons died in 1994.

Introduction

The French call a typewriter une machine á ècrire. It is a description that could well be applied to Julian Symons, except the writing he produced had nothing about it smelling of the mechanical. The greater part of his life was devoted to putting pen to paper. Appearing in 1938, his first book was a volume of poetry, Confusions About X. In 1996, after his death, there came his final crime novel, A Sort of Virtue (written even though he knew he was under sentence from an inoperable cancer) beautifully embodying the painful come-by lesson that it is possible to achieve at least a degree of good in life.

His crime fiction put him most noticeably into the public eye, but he wrote in many forms: biographies, a memorable piece of autobiography (Notes from Another Country), poetry, social history, literary criticism coupled with year-on-year reviewing and two volumes of military history, and one string thread runs through it all. Everywhere there is a hatred of hypocrisy, hatred even when it aroused the delighted fascination with which he chronicled the siren schemes of that notorious jingoist swindler, Horatio Bottomley, both in his biography of the man and fictionally in The Paper Chase and The Killing of Francie Lake.

That hatred, however, was not a spew but a well-spring. It lay behind what he wrote and gave it force, yet it was always tempered by a need to speak the truth. Whether he was writing about people as fiction or as fact, if he had a low opinion of them he simply told the truth as he saw it, no more and no less.

This adherence to truth fills his novels with images of the mask. Often it is the mask of hypocrisy. When, as in Death’s Darkest Face or Something Like a Love Affair, he chose to use a plot of dazzling legerdemain, the masks of cunning are startlingly ripped away.

The masks he ripped off most effectively were perhaps those which people put on their true faces when sex was in the air or under the exterior. ‘Lift the stone, and sex crawls out from under,’ says a character in that relentless hunt for truth, The Progress of a Crime, a book that achieved the rare feat for a British author, winning Symons the US Edgar Allen Poe Award.

Julian was indeed something of a pioneer in the fifties and sixties bringing into the almost sexless world of the detective story the truths of sexual situations. ‘To exclude realism of description and language from the crime novel’ he writes in Critical Occasions, ‘is almost to prevent its practitioners from attempting any serious work.’ And then the need to unmask deep-hidden secrecies of every sort was almost as necessary at the end of his crime-writing life as it had been at the beginning. Not for nothing was his last book subtitled A Political Thriller.

H R F Keating

London, 2001

PART ONE

Wife Going

Chapter One Breakfast Conversation

A June morning, the sky blue. If anybody had asked Gilbert Welton are you happy and if he could have been persuaded to answer (which is unlikely, because the question would not have seemed to him meaningful) he would have said yes. The most serious problem confronting him seemed to be the buying of a new hat. Yet happiness is often the thinnest of veneers, and Virginia’s words slightly scratched its surface. His coffee cup was raised to his lips when she spoke.

‘I think I should go away.’

For a moment he did not properly hear the words, and when he heard he did not understand them. He drank some coffee, dabbed his lips with his napkin. ‘What was that?’

‘I said, I ought to go away.’ She amended this, although with an air rather of amplifying it. ‘I mean, have a holiday. To think things out.’

He pushed his plate with a half-eaten piece of toast on it firmly away from him. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘You heard me. I’ve said it twice. Just for a time.’

It occurred to him that she was ill, and had been keeping the fact from him. ‘Is there something wrong? Have you been to a doctor?’

Virginia gave the question her serious consideration. ‘No, I haven’t. There’s nothing wrong. Not in that way.’

Gilbert did not think of himself as an impatient man, but the conversation irritated him. ‘Then I don’t understand you.’

‘I need to find out things. About myself. About us.’

He felt relief at the words. Virginia was a great reader of glossy magazines, and obviously her words sprang from an article in one of them. ‘Do You Need a Holiday From Your Husband?… The Strain of Being Happily Married… Are You a Robot Wife?’, he could see the headlines. He did not say this, but instead stared down at the things on the table, the blue and green cups, toast precisely cut in triangles, home-made marmalade, butter in its dish. Then he looked up and out into the garden, a St John’s Wood garden, small and neat, with rose-bushes and clematis trailing up the end wall. Last night Virginia had been putting fertilizer on the roses.

‘Last night you were doing the roses.’ It seemed a sufficient contradiction of her words.

She offered him a cigarette, but he shook his head. He never smoked before midday. She lighted one herself and blew out smoke. ‘What was I doing to them?’ He hesitated – had it been fertilizer, or had she been digging about with a trowel? She smiled faintly. ‘You see?’

‘What difference does it make what you were doing?’

‘If you don’t see that–’

‘I don’t. You’re being ridiculous.’

‘You think so?’

With conscious patience he went on. ‘You must have a reason. What things do you want to think out?’

She blew out more smoke. ‘I like marriage to be hills and valleys, a sort of switchback ride. You want to live on a plateau. But do I want that, that’s what I have to find out.’

Hills, valleys, plateaux, what was she talking about? It occurred to him that if he took the conversation seriously this should be an emotional moment, one or other of them ought to be excited, throw something, burst into tears. Instead Virginia sat in her flowered dressing-gown, neat, dark, elegant, perfectly composed. They were two composed people. He took refuge in irony.

‘Not immediately, I hope. We’ve got people coming to dinner. Max is bringing that American novelist.’

A smile curled the edges of her mouth. ‘I’ll be here. Everything’s laid on. I thought I might go next week.’

Irritation swelled in him like a balloon, but he kept his voice down. ‘Virginia, I’m a rational person–’

‘Oh, so am I. I mean, you’ve taught me.’

‘You’re not making sense. You tell me you have to go away because you want to live on hills instead of plateaux. It can’t be the truth.’ He snatched at the packet of cigarettes which she had left on the table, took one out and lighted it.

‘Would it make more sense if I said I’d been considering it for some time?’

‘No.’ He said what he had not intended. ‘This all comes from something you’ve been reading.’

She did not comment on this, but stood up. The impression of delicacy given by her features was rather belied by her figure which was strong, coarse, with shapely but powerful peasant legs. ‘I’ve got to get dressed, I’m having my hair done at ten.’

‘You told me this when there was no time to talk,’ he said, although there was nothing he wanted less than to talk about it.

‘There’ll be plenty of time for that.’ She paused at the door and added reflectively, ‘Though I’m not sure there’s anything to say.’

He sat at the table after she had gone, touching things with his fingers, the coffee and milk jugs, the toast-rack. He reflected that some people would have gone upstairs now and as the phrase went had it out with her, but he was Gilbert Welton and that was not possible for him. He believed, as he often said in the office, that if you let a difficult situation alone it generally changed into an easier one. And as he listened to Virginia talking with her usual cheerfulness to their daily, Mrs Park, it was hard to believe that any ‘situation’ existed at all.

‘I’m off, got to rush.’ She blew him a kiss. ‘You’ll be late for the office. See you tonight. Bye.’

As he brushed his teeth and ran the comb through his hair he told himself that the whole thing was nonsensical. He still had a lot of good thick wavy hair, and the grey wings added distinction. A touch of grey was appropriate at the age of forty-five, and he had kept his figure, his face was almost unlined. People rarely realized that Virginia was twelve years his junior. Not that he minded if they did realize it. He believed that if he took some care about his appearance it was not out of vanity, but because there was nothing more wretched than a middle-aged man who had let himself go.

By the time that he had said goodbye to Mrs Park and stepped out into a fine morning he had eliminated the breakfast conversation from his conscious mind. Virginia was – he always realized the fact with surprise – a stupid woman intellectually.

At the hairdresser’s she would read another magazine article and talk just as seriously about – oh, about the problems of being a second wife. Probably she would not refer again to their conversation. If she said nothing, he had no intention of mentioning it.

Chapter Two A Bad Morning at the Office

Gilbert had a feeling for architecture. He derived pleasure every time that he looked at the proportions of their early Victorian house, the weight and shapeliness that avoided the solemn ostentation of later Victorian building. The appearance of the office, a small eighteenth-century house just off the sleazier part of Soho, gave him pleasure too, and so did the fascia which said ER AND GILBERT WELTON in elegant capitals. The plate glass window beneath, which carried a display of the firm’s recent publications, was not so good. Not that there was anything wrong with it, or with the books discreetly displayed there, but the very idea that a publisher should set out his wares in a shop window as if he were a butcher was faintly disagreeable. Inside, he nodded to the new switchboard girl whose name he could not remember, and went upstairs.

His office was square, with a large desk almost in the middle of it. He had no sooner sat down at the desk than Miss Pinkthorn was on him. She was a large efficient woman who had been with the firm in his father’s time. She surged in like a resistless tide, and bustled about the office conveying by the sense of urgency in her movements that he was late. The clock on his desk said half past ten.

‘Mr Paine would like a word. As soon as you’re free.’ Paine was the production manager, and his words were always technical. ‘And Derek Niven rang about the design for his jacket. He asked you to ring back. I don’t think he likes it.’

I don’t think he likes it – what a wretched way to formulate a phrase. Why not say accurately, I think he dislikes it? Looking down at the mercifully small mound of correspondence on his desk and then up again at the massive body confronting him, he wondered suddenly and uncharacteristically about Miss Pinkthorn’s sex life. He had a vague idea that she lived with her widowed sister, but perhaps this was not true, perhaps she had spent the previous night with a man, middle-aged to elderly, to whom she had said this morning, I think I should go away. Was there a man, any man at all, in Miss Pinkthorn’s life?

‘Yes,’ he said as he turned over the letters in front of him. ‘Yes. Yes.’

‘Shall I get Mr Niven?’

Up with her knees and down with her head, That is the way to make good cockle bread. He averted his gaze from Miss Pink-thorn’s bulk.

‘Let me have a copy of the jacket drawing.’

‘On the desk.’ A large hand unearthed it, bulging breasts were adjacent to him. The drawing was deplorable, but it was said to be the kind of thing that sold books.

‘Authors never like their jackets. I sometimes wonder why we let them see anything at all.’ He exhaled, a soundless sigh. ‘Get me Mr Niven. And when I’ve done with him, ask Paine to come up.’

The day had begun. It continued like other days, with long and tedious discussions about costing figures and sales figures and a wrangle with an agent about the advance that should be paid to an author whose contract was due for renewal. He thought suddenly – and it was the kind of thought that hardly ever received admission to his mind – that publishing of this kind was not an occupation that suited him. The production of some finely printed little pamphlet containing a dozen poems by a young writer, a limited edition of a previously unknown essay by Max Beerbohm, these would have been a different matter, but the hour to hour minutiae of a business run presumably for profit was something that seemed, if he was rash enough to consider it, almost degrading. During a long discussion with Paine and Coldharbour about the costing of a travel book which seemed certain to show a loss no matter how many or how few copies were printed, his mind drifted to the breakfast conversation. It became linked with an image of Miss Pinkthorn kicking up her bulky legs.

‘At three thousand copies, with this number of plates, there’s nothing in it for us if we sell them all.’ Paine was a small man with a disagreeable Cockney whine in his voice. ‘At five thousand–’

‘We shall never sell five,’ Coldharbour chimed in.

‘If we cut the number of plates by half–’

‘We should lose sales,’ Coldharbour said. ‘Besides the number of plates is in the agreement.’

Silence. They looked at him. He said nothing.

‘Lyme and Makepeace are expensive,’ Paine whined. ‘I could try Selvers.’

That stung him. ‘Could you guarantee that Selvers would do as good a job?’ He knew the answer to that. ‘Very well then, it’s out of the question.’

In the end they agreed to print five thousand copies and hope for the sale of sheets to America. It was a faint hope. When Paine had gone Coldharbour said, ‘Have you got five minutes to spare, Gilbert?’

Denis Coldharbour was a thin nervous man who had come into the firm five years earlier, as a working director providing an infusion of fresh capital. The business Gilbert inherited from his father, ER, had been comparatively small but flourishing. It was based upon one best-selling middlebrow novelist, several useful bread-and-butter writers, some highly successful children’s books and a steady selling series called British Sights and Scenes. At the time that ER collapsed and died while making a speech to the Publishers’ Association about trade terms on single order copies, he was starting to develop a series of educational books for sale in the under-developed countries. Since Gilbert took charge the best-seller had gone elsewhere, two of the bread-and-butter writers had died, the number of British Sights and Scenes about which books could be written seemed to be exhausted, and he had abandoned the educational books as too much trouble, replacing them by an idea of his own for a finely printed series of reprints of travel classics which had proved a disastrous failure. Coldharbour’s money had been welcome.

That could not quite be said of Coldharbour. He was a fussy man who sprayed his office daily with some strange insecticide, ate vegetarian food and always wore a brown paper vest for warmth. His first words now were slightly startling. ‘How’s Virginia?’

He repeated the name as though she were a stranger. ‘Very well. Why?’

‘I saw her at the Moonsight Galleries yesterday. She seemed rather’ – Coldharbour sought for a word and came up with – ‘distrait.’

‘Did you talk to her?’

‘I didn’t actually talk to her, no.’ He moved in his chair and the brown paper crackled slightly. ‘I didn’t know she was interested in modern art.’

Neither did I, Gilbert refrained from saying. ‘Do you mean she looked ill?’

‘Not ill.’ He spoke as if there were some area between illness and health in which he had discovered Virginia. ‘Oh, certainly not ill. I didn’t mean to alarm you.’

‘There’s no question of being alarmed,’ he said with unintended sharpness. Supposing he said that Virginia had announced her intention of going away, would Coldharbour be surprised? Perhaps he had wondered for a long time why she had married a man so much older than herself. Coldharbour proceeded always by hints and suggestions. Was he saying now that there had been a man with Virginia in the gallery?

‘She’s a very delightful woman.’ Coldharbour himself lived alone in a large basement flat in Maida Vale. Gilbert was aware that he had not heard what was being said, and asked Cold-harbour to repeat it.

‘Johnson, Braddock, Delaney.’

‘What was that?’

‘And possibly Sharkey.’ Coldharbour looked coy. ‘Even Heenan.’

‘Who is Heenan?’

‘Not hard edge. And certainly not Pop.’ A surprisingly masculine chuckle rumbled up from inside him. ‘A long way beyond Pop.’

‘Denis, I seem to have missed something.’

‘They call themselves Spatial Realists, their whole concept is one of spatial flatness. After all a canvas is originally fiat, isn’t that so? Any attempt to deny flatness is in a sense a fake.’ Cold-harbour put his fingers together. ‘As you know, Gilbert, I’ve always maintained that we’ve missed the boat in the past. My belief is that the time has come…’

Ever since he came into the firm Coldharbour had wanted to produce a number of monographs, first on Art Nouveau and its origins, then on abstract art, most recently on a movement called Pubism which so far as Gilbert could see would have landed them in court for reproducing obscene pictures. Obviously Pubism had been replaced by Spatial Realism. He felt inclined to say that the whole idea was nonsense, but that was not the way in which a civilized publisher talked to a colleague.

‘You thought a series of monographs…’

‘No. Oh no, not a series. I see it as one big book, Spatial Realism and the Art of the Seventies, something like that. Of course we should need an informed introductory essay by somebody who knows what’s what, Bryan Robertson perhaps or David Sylvester.’

‘Denis, what can I say? It’s simply not on.’ Out-of-date slang, no doubt, and he regretted it. Yet somehow the phrase was reassuring. ‘It’s outside our field. We’re not equipped to handle it saleswise.’ Not slang now but jargon, yet again it seemed expressive.

‘If we never publish any art books they’ll always be outside our field,’ Coldharbour said reasonably. He crossed one knee over the other, showing an expanse of dead white leg. A curious scent was wafted across the room. Had Coldharbour been spraying his socks? The smell stirred some memory which he could not be bothered to place. ‘I know for a fact that Studio Vista are interested, and Faber too. A Tate exhibition is a real possibility.’

‘You know what our commitments are. It could be a very expensive book.’

A derisive sound came through Coldharbour’s nose. ‘If there is a show at the Tate we could sell ten thousand.’ He pulled at the trouser, showing more leg. ‘Am I to understand that you dismiss it out of hand?’

‘I don’t see how we can do it.’

‘Then I have to say that in my view this is a practicable and profitable piece of publishing which should be most seriously considered.’ He sat up and the brown paper rustled. ‘Which is more than can be said for some of Bomberg’s activities.’

As though on a signal the door opened and Max Bomberg’s round head appeared. ‘Killing two birds with one stone,’ he said and entered. ‘Gilbert, Denis, great news.’ He spread his arms, grinning.

Max Bomberg was a Hungarian who had come into the firm two years earlier on the recommendation of Virginia’s Uncle Alex, who was something to do with a merchant bank. He had had no previous direct connection with book publishing, but had been managing editor of a group of magazines and then sales director of a printing house which produced technical journals mainly for the overseas market. The magazine group had been bought up by a large corporation at what was said to be a bargain price because they were on their last legs, and there were rumours that many of the technical journals were being eaten by red ants in African warehouses, but Uncle Alex had no doubt about Bomberg’s ability. The man was a business genius, he said. Had he got money? He had something better, a nose for success.

‘What’s your turnover?’ Uncle Alex had asked, rather like a nurse asking about bowel motions, and when he heard the answer had said that Bomberg would double it within a couple of years. The business genius had been invited to dinner and under Uncle Alex’s benevolent eye had talked vaguely but impressively about profitability margins and the tactics of expansion. Would he put in capital? Not exactly, but a complicated arrangement never clearly understood by Gilbert was made under which Welton’s obtained a holding not in the printing house but in an allied company, and Bomberg was given what seemed to be an extremely large number of shares in Welton’s. Since then – well, since then it was hard to say exactly what had happened. Certainly turnover had increased considerably, but this was because Bomberg had taken on a number of new authors, paying what were by Welton’s standards enormous advances. Where was the money coming from? At such a question he would smile in a slightly pitying way.

‘About this, my dear, you don’t worry. It will be a bad day when Max Bomberg can’t get credit for a good proposition, and this is a first-class proposition.’ Max never put forward anything but first-class propositions and Gilbert, who was aware of the restraints and hesitations in his own nature, warmed to such certainties. Now Max’s cherubic grin widened. He said dramatically, ‘Bunce is on “People in the News” tonight. I have arranged it.’

Jake Bunce was an American novelist who had come over for the publication of his novel, The Way They Get You Going. He was one of Max’s most dubious acquisitions. Gilbert did not see how they could recoup the advance that had been paid to lure him away from a bigger firm. When they discussed taking him on, Max had slapped a copy of Life on the table.

‘Look there, a six-page spread, Jake Bunce on Dope, Drink and Saintliness. You see what it says, he’s the hottest thing out of Brooklyn since Mailer.’

‘Brooklyn,’ Coldharbour had said, with the air of a man who has heard of the place.

They had taken Bunce on, he had arrived in England that day and was coming to dinner. Bomberg had gone to the airport to meet him, and must just have returned.

‘That’s very good news.’ Gilbert was never able quite to convey enthusiasm.

Max pointed a finger. ‘And he has a radio interview on “World at One” in a couple of days’ time. I tell you, they’re falling over themselves. We’ve got a really hot property here.’

‘Where is he now?’ Coldharbour asked lugubriously. He had unhooked his leg and the scent had disappeared.

‘Resting up in the hotel. Oh, I tell you he’s a charmer. Can’t wait to meet you.’

If Jake Bunce had really been so anxious to meet him, Gilbert reflected, he could have come to the office, but he did not say this. ‘I shall see him this evening.’

‘You certainly will.’

‘And you’ll make sure he gets to the studio.’

‘You bet your life. About this evening, just one little thing.’ He spoke with the casualness he always used when saying something awkward. ‘Jake’s brought this girl over, some kind of way out girl in films.’

‘We’re not paying any of her expenses, I hope.’ Coldharbour spoke sharply.

‘Now, Denis, would I commit us to anything like that?’ Max transferred his attention back to Gilbert. ‘No, the thing is this, my dear, Jake asked if he could bring Lulu along with him tonight. I said yes. He’s pretty informal, you know, he’s an informal kind of character, he never had any doubt it would be OK.’ In moments of embarrassment or excitement Max’s speech was often infused with a slightly American flavour. ‘I’m sorry as hell if it’s going to put out Virginia. Should I give her a ring?’

‘I’ll speak to her myself. I’m sure she’ll manage.’ Who knew what extraordinary thing Virginia might say on the telephone?

He rang her after Max had bounced out and Coldharbour had reluctantly followed him, threatening to renew their discussion about Spatial Realism later on. Her voice had the composure and coolness he had always admired.

‘It’s a bore but we’ll manage. Would you like me to rustle up another man?’

‘No, don’t bother.’

‘I look forward to Mr Bunce and his Lulu. And Max is always fun.’

‘It’s good of you not to make a fuss.’

He thought of mentioning the breakfast conversation, even though earlier he had decided not to refer to it, but no words came out. Then Miss Pinkthorn sailed in with letters which she placed aggressively in front of him. He said goodbye and put back the receiver. As he did so he remembered the recollection roused by Coldharbour’s scent-sprayed socks, if indeed it had been his socks that gave off that curious whiff. In the last few weeks Virginia had changed the scent she used, from one which was light, cool and only faintly discernible, to something distinctly heavier and sweeter. Somebody with a less keen sense of smell might not have noticed it, and his own awareness had been only semi-conscious. Why had she changed?

Chapter Three Lunch at the Club

The club was one of those frequented in about equal proportions by publishers, writers, lawyers, advertising and public relations men, and rather oddly a considerable number of tennis and cricket players and other athletes, who were attracted by the squash and five courts and the large swimming-pool. Gilbert lunched there on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of each week. To do so had become part of the pattern of his life. Besides, ER had lunched there three days a week. ‘The best club in London,’ his father had said on first leading him into the long dark panelled room. ‘You never know who you may meet here. Great men, little men, administrators and creators. You may sit next at table to Stephen Spender or to the Lord Chief Justice. Membership of the club is a liberal education.’

On that first occasion Gilbert had sat next to a barrister who talked about the iniquities of the builders who were putting up his new house, and he had never actually seen either Stephen Spender or the Lord Chief Justice in the club, but he appreciated the principle of what his father said. As a young man he had wanted above all to emulate ER, his heavy oratorical flow of speech, his firmness in taking decisions and refusal ever to admit that he had been wrong. Why was he unable to acknowledge even now that he was nothing like his father? Why, he wondered as he walked up the steps and nodded in response to the hall porter’s greeting and spent a minute looking at the ticker-tape which did not much interest him, and another minute in studying the details of the next club supper which interested him even less, why did he come to the club at all?

And why was Virginia using a different scent?

At the long table he sat between an actor named Peter Halding and Langridge-Wood, one of the partners in a large printing firm, and a friend of ER. Later, as they went into the lounge, Langridge-Wood tapped his shoulder. They took their coffee to a window seat.

‘Come and play a hundred up.’

‘I ought to get back.’ But in the office Coldharbour might be at him again, and there was a manuscript about which he had postponed making a decision for days.

‘Won’t take you long to beat me. Want to have a chat.’

In the billiards room, under the lights which shone down intensely on the green baize, he felt more at home than in most other places. Playing the balls up the table as they cued for break and watching his own land almost on the back cushion, a perfect stroke, he reflected that this at least was something he had done better than his father. In the hush of the semi-darkened room, where the only sounds were the slight squeak of chalk on cue tip and the click of white on red, there was a sort of placidity. That morning on his walk to the office he had been uncustomarily disturbed by the thought that he was destined to live out his days in ER’s shadow, doing inefficiently what his father had done well, slowly running down the firm that his father had created. But as he put side on his ball so that it shot delicately off white and into the pocket, these things took on their proper perspective. What did it matter if the firm was running down? Was it Louis XV who had said ‘It will last my time’? Welton’s would certainly last his time, and Matthew had made it plain that he wanted no part in it. There would be no second descension from father to son, he thought as he admired his own skill in playing a nursery cannon and keeping the balls together. The firm had given him an easy life, an elegant house, Virginia. Thinking of Virginia he miscued. Langridge-Wood used the chalk.

‘Just a word, young Gilbert. Wanted to say I was very glad to hear there are prospects.’

‘Prospects?’ What was the old fool talking about, the new authors on their lists?

Langridge-Wood’s bald head shone under the lamps. He was a player who when in doubt hit the ball as hard as he could and hoped for the best. Now he banged white and red round the table and saw his optimism rewarded when the red dropped unexpectedly into a pocket. He followed this with two successful forcing shots and made a break of fifteen.

‘Life in the old dog yet. Don’t mind saying there are times when I’ve been worried.’

‘Really?’

‘About the firm. But it’s a great country, America. Wide open. ER always said so. Accepters, not rejecters, he used to say. That’s important.’

He must presumably have heard about Bunce. ‘Yes, we’re very pleased with what’s been happening. You know he’s over here?’

Langridge-Wood’s hearing aid started to whistle. ‘What’s that? Didn’t hear.’

‘We’re all very pleased. On this side of the water,’ he added, and felt the inanity of a phrase which ER would have rolled out impressively.

From this point on he began to play badly. Mention of ER made him remember their games here, games which his father usually won when it came to a close finish. Nerve, ER had said to him, you’re a better player than I am, my boy, but you just lack that little bit of nerve. And now Langridge-Wood, hitting the balls as though he hated them, playing uncouth strokes that sent them flying round the table to come together again miraculously for an easy shot to follow, went ahead and punctuated his play with unintelligible remarks.

‘Africa too, that’s opening up. Very shrewd,’ he said at one point, and at another, ‘You know what ER said? “Get your toe in you’ve got your foot in. Get your foot in and if you’re tough enough they’ll never get you out.” Very true, that. True about Africa, I’ve always thought so.’

In the end Gilbert began to bang the balls as hard as Langridge-Wood, but with less success. He lost the game.

‘They dropped for me.’ Langridge-Wood racked his cue with some satisfaction. ‘Soothing game. Always find it clears the head. Mind you, you were out of touch. Glad we’ve had a word.’

‘Yes.’

‘And just bear us in mind in the future. I see great things ahead.’ He sounded like a seaside palmist.

‘I’m delighted to hear it.’

‘Glad for you, young Gilbert. I was a friend of your father’s, remember. He was a great man.’

They parted on the steps. Langridge-Wood gave his hand a meaningful pressure, said, ‘We’ll be in touch,’ and stepped into a cab. Gilbert walked back to the office. Coldharbour left him in peace. He looked again at the manuscript, the memoirs of a Second World War military leader, and decided to reject it.