MING FROG BOWL (1961). Oil on board.

Dating from the early years of Kelly’s marriage, when economy forced her to recycle her materials, this tiny painting is worked on the back of a larger work (artist unknown) which she sawed into pieces. Bowl with Greengages (1961) and Milk Bottle with Corn Cockles (1961) were painted on other fragments of the same work. It shows the interior of an Early Wanli dish, dating from around 1580, showing a toad – not a frog – sitting amidst plants and on a cloud of what may be toad spawn. Such porcelain dishes were made in the late Ming era for export to the Japanese market. Utterly unlike her later work, it displays a precocious academic flair. Careful examination of the light reflections on her bowl’s surface reveals the distorted representation of a couple standing between the bowl and a nearby sash window. Perhaps Ming Frog Bowl represents a tentative step towards painting of obvious commercial and decorative appeal. Kelly certainly retained a sneaking admiration for the exquisite still lives of William Nicholson at a period when they were quite out of fashion compared to the abstracts of his son, Ben and this work could be read as a homage to his. Kelly is not known ever to have possessed or had access to such a valuable ceramic so it is assumed she worked either from a postcard or from memory. A remarkably similar bowl formed part of Oxford’s Ashmolean collections until it was accidentally broken in 1970.

(Lent by the Warden and Fellows of Christchurch College, Oxford)

They had exchanged letters. Garfield wrote to her father initially, attaching a photocopy of Rachel’s letter, explaining that Rachel had recently died and that he desired nothing but to meet.

‘I quite understand how awkward this will be for you,’ he wrote. ‘And that you may wish to have nothing to do with me. I feel sure you are as curious as I am, though. I know you probably have family and will perhaps prefer not to introduce me to them or in any way alert them to my existence.’ As an afterthought he enclosed a fairly recent photograph Lizzy had taken of him when they were out on a friend’s boat. It revealed little about him, of course, other than that he was in his forties, capable of smiling, possessed of good teeth and all his hair, but he hoped it might make the receipt of the letter less alarming, stop it, at least, from seeming the work of a crank.

A card came back almost at once. It was of some porcelain in the Ashmolean.

My father is beyond correspondence these days. And is probably too confused to understand who you are. You are welcome to come and look at him whenever you like. We never leave home but the late afternoons are best, between four and six o’clock. Yours sincerely, Niobe Shepherd.

It seemed to be the only house in St John’s Street that had not been restored and cosseted in recent memory. Garfield had researched Simeon Shepherd on the Internet and found that he was an art historian who had published no articles for twenty years and no books for thirty. He had found a copy of his monograph relating Uccello to an Iranian artist of the same period and had tried to read it on the train but, with baffling assumption of knowledge, it had no illustrations and seemed to be more footnote than text. What he had learnt led him to expect severity and elegance. This house must once have had both but now looked down-at-heel, even shifty. Its tarnished brass knocker was of an odd, possibly Masonic design, a kind of triangle suspended from an eye. The rust-coloured paint was flaking so badly from the door he could see patches of bare, blackened wood. He knocked too vigorously and a large paint flake fluttered to the ground.

A sharp-nosed, middle-aged woman opened the door, took one look at him and exclaimed, ‘Christ! Sorry. That was a shock even after the photograph. You’d better come in.’

‘Thanks.’ He stepped into the gloomy hall. It smelled of gas and damp and he noticed the woman was wearing two cardigans.

She gave a quick smile that revealed nothing. ‘I’m Niobe Shepherd,’ she said. ‘My father’s upstairs.’

His half-sister. And she said my father not our or your. Garfield’s mind was working so hard at missing nothing he found it hard to speak.

‘I’d keep your coat on,’ she said. ‘The boiler’s packed up again and he’s got the only fire. I’ve just made tea. Do you want a cup?’

‘Yes, please.’

He followed her into the kitchen. It was like an advertisement from 1952 and did not appear to have been redecorated since then. There was a sour, lemon colour on the walls. The torn curtains were decorated with a frenzied ‘kitchen’ pattern of spice jars and bay trees. There was the kind of gas cooker that lit with a wand on a greasy hose and, beside it, slope-fronted cupboards with striped glass doors that slid in unclearable crumb-clogged grooves. A saucer on the floor held a half-eaten sardine, another, some yellowing milk. An enormous, off-white cat glared from discomitingly yellow eyes on a blanket-covered chair in the corner.

The table was barely visible beneath a thick typescript and an array of open shoeboxes filled with little cards. He picked a stray one off his chair in order to sit down. In a tiny version of her handwriting it read, Slater, Montagu and gave a list of page numbers.

She took it from him with a muted, ‘I knew I hadn’t lost that,’ and tucked it into one of the boxes then poured him a mug of tea. ‘Is it very tarry?’ she asked.

It was tepid. ‘It’s fine,’ he assured her. ‘It’ll wake me up.’

She sat across from him and ferreted out a packet of gingernuts from under the pages of typescript she had already turned. ‘Indexing,’ she explained. ‘It means I can work from home and save paying someone else to be here.’

‘Oh. I see. Interesting.’

‘Not very. Dull books are easier on the whole. If they send one that threatens to be interesting I have to read it backwards to avoid getting too drawn in to do the job properly.’ She stared at him again and laughed shortly. ‘You do look amazingly like him.’

‘Really? Don’t you?’

‘Not at all. I take after my mother.’

‘Is she …?’

She shook her head and dunked a biscuit. ‘She died years ago. You’re, what, forty?’

‘Forty-one,’ he said.

‘So she died when you were a baby.’

‘When you were a child?’

‘I’m quite a bit older than you.’ She coughed nervously. ‘He was always very independent, luckily. Until fairly recently.’

‘Ah.’

They both drank their nasty tea.

‘You probably want to see him now,’ she said abruptly just as he burst out with, ‘My letter must have been a shock.’

They each apologized and made no, after you gestures then she said, ‘Not greatly. You’re not the first.’

‘Really?’

‘He seems to have been both extraordinarily fertile,’ she said, ‘and careless.’

Was this his voice in her? This cool, drily amused superiority?

‘We have three half-brothers,’ she added. ‘That I know about, that is. The other two are both younger than you. Both American. He did several lecture series there after my mother died. I was boarding and it paid handsomely compared to what he made here. They don’t look like him like you do. But there’s an interesting pattern emerging. Your mothers all kept a secret until they died and you’ve all said you don’t want anything. Which is lucky, given that there’s so little to be had. This is rented.’ Her economical gesture took in the house about them. ‘In case you were wondering.’

‘I wasn’t.’

‘We have it on a long and intractable lease. His attendance allowance and disability benefit help and the council and university do their bits.’

‘What’s wrong with him?’

She sighed, stacking index cards into neat piles and as she bent her head forward, he noticed a bald patch on her scalp, perhaps four inches across. She had attempted to disguise it by growing the rest of her hair long and pinning it across in an artful disarray but as she fretted and rubbed at it, the habitual gesture she made now, the artifice was steadily pulled aside.

‘He had a stroke,’ she said. ‘At first that was all and he lost most of his speech. Then he had another one and lost the use of his right leg. Now I think it’s just advanced crumble and multi-infarct thingy. I used to be able to understand what he was saying but most of the time now it doesn’t make sense. And he’s stopped reading or writing, which is a bad sign.’

‘Did he meet the others?’

‘Oh yes. He had quite long talks with both of them and was signally unimpressed. You’ll have a much easier time of it. Shall we go up?’

Was there some mischievous pleasure for her in all this? Some grim amusement to be had at this futile hunger in her male half-relatives for a meaningful connection to an absent and faithless father? The cat jumped off its chair with a malevolent growl and led the way upstairs. As they climbed past dim etchings Garfield could barely decipher in the half-light, the sounds of a television drew closer.

Simeon Shepherd’s room was stifling after the tomb-like chill downstairs. An oscillating fan heater was competing with a Western. The old man in the wheelchair was asleep, his head to one side. He had thick, white hair and sharper versions of Garfield’s features. Now it was Garfield’s turn to swear under his breath.

Niobe looked from one to the other. ‘Sinister, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Like the last scene of that stupid Kubrick film. He’ll turn into an embryo next. Pa? Pa!’ She gave her father a vigorous shake. ‘Bit deaf too,’ she explained to Garfield. ‘Sit. Please.’ She muted the volume on the television.

Her father, their father, was looking around him and blinking as deliberately as an owl.

‘This is Garfield Middleton, Pa. His late mother was another of your girlfriends.’

Simeon Shepherd seemed to focus on Garfield a moment or two then murmured something indistinct.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve forgotten your mother’s name.’

‘Rachel Kelly,’ Garfield said.

‘The painter?’

‘Yes. I thought I’d told you.’

‘Good lord. He should have married her and made some money that way. Silly fool. Rachel Kelly, Pa! The abstract painter! You know? Cornwall! Patrick Heron!’

He made another gargling sound and looked quite definitely at Garfield now.

‘Ah,’ she said. ‘That got through. He hates abstract art with a passion. I’ll leave you two to get acquainted.’

‘Oh, but …’ Garfield thought to ask her to stay and interpret but she was too brisk. ‘You can’t stay long,’ she said. ‘He has the concentra tion span of a gnat and he’ll probably fall asleep again in a bit. I’ll be back in the kitchen.’

She left them alone with the cat, which leapt on to the old man’s lap where it seemed to double in size as it reached almost to his chin. Garfield had been wondering how such a thin, bookish-looking woman found the strength to haul her father in and out of bed and bath but he saw now the man was even slighter than she was, a human husk. There was a kind of winch contraption over the bed and, presumably, similar machinery in the bathroom.

The old man was still staring at him, stroking the cat as a reflex.

‘Hello,’ Garfield said. ‘My mother died a couple of months ago. She’d written me a letter that explained you were my father, otherwise I’d never have known …’ He heard this explanation tail off foolishly. Abashed, he looked about the room.

The paintwork and carpet were as threadbare as elsewhere but there were things of beauty in here; a small Flemish painting of a young woman hung over the fireplace and there was a gilt-framed landscape behind the sofa of an avenue of poplars that looked French. They went badly together but perhaps represented the only things of worth father and daughter had not yet been obliged to sell. He hoped at least one of them would survive for Niobe. In their brief, strange interview he had begun to feel affection for her. He glanced at the television.

‘The Searchers, isn’t it?’ he asked. ‘I like Westerns too. Ford’s almost like a painter, isn’t he, the way he gets his cameraman to draw the beauty out of those landscapes? He composes them and makes you look.’

Still the stare.

‘I wonder if you ever saw any of my mother’s paintings? Rachel Kelly? Was she painting yet when you … knew her? They were amazing. She lost her way a bit after my … The earlier ones, the ones from the Seventies, I think they’ll stand up for themselves for a while yet. I live in Falmouth,’ he added. ‘With my wife Elizabeth. Lizzy. She’s a violin teacher and I mend violins. Well any stringed instrument. I had to rebuild a double bass last year after someone put a foot through one. That was a challenge! I didn’t always do this. I was working as a solicitor. In London. But so many of the clients were crooks and … My wife … It wasn’t right somehow and then I helped out in her father’s violin workshop and he taught me before he died and it sort of happened. I read your last book. Well, I did my best. Not really my field.’

He stopped talking. This was pointless. Simeon Shepherd’s expression had altered so little Garfield wondered if he were actually asleep again but with his eyes open. He thought of how Antony would behave in such circumstances and made an effort to sit in companionable silence instead. There was a waist-height, glass-fronted bookcase against one wall and on it, a cluster of silver-framed photographs. Even at this distance, by the indirect light from the standard lamp a few feet away, he could distinguish the stereotypical formats of a wedding photograph and a studio portrait of a mother and baby. There was also a portrait of a man in uniform.

‘Can I see?’ he said after a second’s hesitation and went to pick it up. ‘Was this you?’ Of course it was. It might have been a younger version of himself in fancy dress with a particularly cheap and savage haircut. The young man was smiling. Was this, Garfield wondered, the smile that had seduced Rachel? Or had she seduced him?

It was impossible to imagine. She had always been so wild and exuberant and risky. And so mad. Yet everything in this house, in the book he had tried to read, in the bleakly dutiful daughter downstairs, spoke of sanity, reserve and withdrawal; the antitheses of a passionate life. The young man in the photograph was handsome enough but it was hard to see him as a serial seducer. Perhaps he had simply been the passive-manipulative sort, adept at projecting a veneer of helplessness so that women couldn’t help responding to him. He thought instinctively of Lizzy and her insistent baby hunger. Perhaps Rachel and the others had been decades ahead of their time in coolly appraising Simeon Shepherd as the ideal oblivious donor, his cheekbones almost as high as his IQ.

There was a trembling in his pocket from his mobile. He took it out, apologizing, and saw it was a text message from Lizzy saying simply, Well? L.x.

An idea occurred to him. He should take a picture to show her and any child they might eventually have. ‘Would you mind if I took your photograph?’ he asked. ‘To show my wife?’

Simeon Shepherd was staring at the television now, confused maybe at the lack of sound. Garfield lined him and the monstrous cat up in his mobile’s viewfinder, moved the standard lamp so that it cast a better light over them, then took the picture.

The mobile’s camera made a tiny noise, the sound of an old-fashioned camera shutter and film winder, as pointlessly nostalgic as the pseudo clockwork tick added to some electric watches. It was a tiny noise, far quieter than the purring of the cat, but apparently it reached the old man and enraged him. Or perhaps he had indeed been asleep with his eyes opened and was always bad-tempered on waking. For whatever reason he was suddenly bolt upright, focused and angry. He shouted senselessly and shook his hands at Garfield. The cat yowled, jumped free and ran hissing from the room.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Garfield said, alarmed. ‘It’s just a tiny camera. I took your photograph to show my wife. Look. You want to see the picture? You don’t? Oh. Well. Shit.’

He took up the remote control and unmuted the television so the room filled again with the sound of surging film score and whichever Californian landscape was doing duty for the Wild West. Then he hurried out, shutting the door behind him.

Niobe Shepherd was deeply involved in her indexing again and evidently inured to outbreaks of noise from upstairs because he stood in the kitchen doorway without her looking up and he ended by clearing his throat and saying a vague, ‘Well, I should be erm …’

She gave one of her ambivalent half-smiles and came to see him out.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That probably wasn’t quite the cosy reunion you’d pictured.’

He shrugged, feeling desolate now. ‘I don’t know what I’d pictured. But meeting you was … Here. Let me give you my details. Ah, but you’ve got them already. Of course you have. Falmouth is a lot closer than America.’ He added, ‘You’re always welcome to visit us and, well, let me know how he gets on. And perhaps you would post me the other names? Of the Americans?’

She was giving him no help. He was the third she had watched writhing like this. Perhaps there would be more? She merely kept that look of possibly malicious amusement about her and opened the front door for him. It was seizing up and she discreetly braced herself with a foot against the jamb as she tugged it open.

‘Let’s keep in touch,’ he said.

‘Let’s,’ she said and something in her manner stopped him offering a hand, as Hedley would have done, or even a friendly kiss such as Lizzy would have mustered. He found himself almost ducking out of the door. ‘Bye,’ she added and shut the door behind him with a thump. Pausing, dazed, on the pavement, he heard her lock it and tug a bolt across.

The sense of desolation that had stolen up on him in the hall intensified as he realized he was now a prisoner of ill-laid plans. Lizzy had suggested he come alone. She was going to a concert in Truro with Antony and Hedley, who seemed to have taken root in his old room and had not been home to London and Oliver since the funeral. At her prompting he had taken a room in a hotel for the night. It was possible he would be asked to spend the evening with his new relations, she said, or that they would want him to fit in a second visit on the Sunday.

He glanced at his watch. There was no longer time to catch the train to Reading that would let him pick up the last bearable train home of the evening. There was always the sleeper, of course, but that didn’t arrive in Reading until well past midnight and there could be no certainty of finding a berth free. His days of making the overnight journey slumped in a seat to save money were long over and besides, such a late journey still obliged him to find some way of filling the evening. He used to know people in Oxford. At least one friend from law school was a legal-aid barrister here somewhere. But he had made no preparatory phone calls, not knowing how things would transpire at the Shepherds’, and had not thought to bring his address book with him.

He began to walk back towards the hotel and thought that of course there was no reason not to ring Lizzy and ask her to look numbers up for him. But then there was always the risk that a reunion with friends with whom he had exchanged no more than Christmas cards since his wedding might prove just as dispiriting as his meeting his natural father.

There was nothing he wanted even slightly to see at the cinema. He scanned the posters but it was half-term and they all seemed to be films aimed at children or at adults who had yet to grow up. Like a fool he had brought nothing to read but Simeon Shepherd’s monograph. He had spotted a tempting secondhand bookshop earlier but all the shops seemed to be closing or already closed for the weekend. He would simply have to break two habits of a lifetime; eat on his own then spend an evening watching television. (They only had a radio at home.) If he caught a train immediately after breakfast he could be home by mid-afternoon, unless there were to be Sunday disruptions on the line.

Just then he spotted a familiar poster and realized the handsome building he was passing on St Giles was Oxford’s Friends’ Meeting House. He doubled back and checked the details, although Meeting for Worship would be at eleven the next day, just as it would be in Falmouth and Penzance. It was not the first time he had wished Meetings happened more often than on Sunday. He felt badly stirred up and quiet contemplation with a group of Friends would have afforded some calmer, clearer thinking. Perhaps his hotel room would be quiet enough for him to turn out the lights, lie on the floor with his head on a pillow and meditate.

He had chosen to stay at the Randolph purely because it was offering a special weekend rate. Loomed over by so much brocade and high Victoriana, he felt underdressed without a tie and wondered if this would give him sufficient excuse to eat in his room rather than suffer the ordeal of a table for one in a restaurant with lighting too romantic to read by.

He wanted a cup of tea and wandered in search of one only to find waitresses wheeling away trolleys of cakes and tea things.

‘Afternoon tea finished half an hour ago,’ one of them explained. ‘But you can get just a cup of tea if you ask in the bar.’

The atmosphere in the bar felt quite wrong for tea and his resolve weakened at the smell of newly chopped lemons and the sound of ice on glass. He ordered a pint of Graduate instead, because he had a raging thirst, and a whisky chaser because his coat was too thin and his aimless walk through the streets had left him chilled.

He found a dark corner table where he could nurse both drinks and think. There had been no revelation. He had felt no sudden imperative of love for his true father, felt nothing for him in fact. But there was no denying he was the old man’s son and he had come away from his wretched household with something he had not possessed before: a kind of permission. He was no longer a Birthright Quaker. He could not pretend that all his upbringing had vanished at a stroke but he now had, it seemed, a different, thornier inheritance with which to balance it.

His father was no longer a pillar of rectitude, a good man on whom, effectively, people had been congratulating him for as long as he could recall. His father now was a man who had shown no loyalty to his wife, sired at least three children with other women to whom he gave no support and had probably made little, if any, provision for the daughter who was inexplicably caring for him in old age. His house had an aridity about it, with no signs of friendship, no suggestions of faith.

He remembered he had not rung Lizzy to make a report and knew, even as it occurred to him, that he wouldn’t. He hardly ever drank. Lizzy was a teetotaller. It was one of those articles of faith, like her vegetarianism, he had absorbed and adjusted to when he met her. Were she somehow able to see him there with spirits as well as beer on the table before him, she would have assumed he was recovering from bad news. It would not have occurred to her that he might be relishing a small step towards independence from principle, even from her. He had just received a small but potent vaccination against goodness, against his family, against something and the alcohol was a first symptomatic reaction.

Guiltily he took out his mobile and pressed 1 to call her. She was out of range or had hers turned off in anticipation of the concert so he left a quick, calm message inviting no response and saying he’d see her the following afternoon and would ring her from the train. He turned his mobile off and slipped it back in his coat pocket then took a long, good draught of excellent bitter.

When he looked up again, a woman was smiling at him from the next table.

‘Job done?’ she asked.

‘Is that how it looked?’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘Pretty much. I’m getting another. What are you having?’

‘Oh, I …’ He saw to his surprise that the pint was almost gone and surprised himself further by letting her buy him a second whisky. She bought him a double and sat across from him at the table.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ he said.

‘Not at all. You probably haven’t noticed but this bar is a shark pool of predatory males.’

‘I hadn’t. Well I’m safe.’ He flashed his wedding band.

‘Me too,’ she laughed, and flashed hers. ‘No,’ she went on. ‘Don’t introduce yourself. I could tell you were about to. If we get each other’s names we start fishing for connections and thinking of associations and, well, let’s just not.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘So you’re here on your own?’

‘Yes. Twice a year I escape my life with the perfectly good excuse of seeing my dentist. I’ve always come to one here. She’s good and causes me no pain and, since it’s only twice a year, I could see no pressing need to change when we moved away. And it’s far enough from home that I can come for a night and enjoy a little break.’

‘Your husband never wants to come too?’

‘I’ve never suggested it. But no. He’s too busy and my going away makes him busier still. Sometimes I coincide with a touring opera company but this time I planned badly so I’ve got a quiet night in ahead of me. You?’

‘Oh. Yes. Quiet night for me too.’

‘I meant why Oxford?’

‘Sorry. Family research. I came to meet the man I’ve just discovered is my biological father.’

‘God! Was it strange?’

‘Very.’

‘Will you see him again?’

‘Probably not. He’s pretty sick and frail anyway. I live a long way away and my life is very different.’

‘So what do you do? Remember this is your chance to lie and impress me.’

‘I can’t lie,’ he admitted. ‘I’m congenitally incapable.’

‘You never lie to your wife?’

‘No.’ He smiled into his glass. ‘I don’t think I’d do it very convincingly.’

She laughed quietly and he saw just how attractive she was. She was slight and almost oriental-looking, with very straight, dark hair that swung forward across her face whenever she looked down. She had shrugged off her suede coat to reveal a neat, subfusc outfit like a woman barrister’s on television. Her silk blouse was undone one button further than she probably realized so that one cup of her bra kept moving in and out of view. She wore a double rope of plump pearls; her husband was busy to some purpose. Garfield was a bad judge of age but placed her on the kinder side of fifty but the other side of motherhood.

‘Do you make a practice of talking to strange men in hotel bars?’ he asked.

‘As I say,’ she said, ‘only twice a year. Are you going to eat? My anaesthetic’s finally worn off and I could eat this beer mat. Can we eat together?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

‘Why not?’ There was no harm in eating and the company of a good-looking woman was preferable to room service and the cultural wasteland he gathered constituted Saturday night television.

He could not, after the event, have said how exactly she ended up in his room. He did remember her cheekily admitting she had not yet got around to checking in when she spotted him in the bar. Perhaps it was the way the waiters treated them, with that sly, suggestive deference they never showed people dining alone? Perhaps it was the grisliness of their fellow-diners that made them feel subtle and attractive by comparison?

Or perhaps it was the name thing? He had heard often enough how prostitutes held back from allowing clients to kiss them. It was always presented as something disappointing and impersonal, as in, ‘Of course, they never let you kiss them.’ As though this somehow made the sex they offered fake. It seemed to Garfield that evening that, by withholding kisses, prostitutes were cannily playing on the sexiness of noncommitment. It was precisely because they didn’t kiss the clients that the clients could depersonalize them to the point of asking for anything. Withholding names was akin to withholding kisses; with no exchange of names, however casual, however fake, there was not even the pretence that these were the early hours of a relationship. Not even a purely friendly one.

By instinct they ordered generic hotel food, rich but safe: a crab thing, steak with béarnaise sauce and sauté potatoes, more wine instead of pudding. And they talked. With a judicious lack of geography or specifics, she told him about her life. Her husband was a consultant urologist but had based her and the family in deep countryside. They had three children, all away at boarding school. She taught the oboe to a handful of children, usually in their schools, sometimes at her house.

‘Do you love them?’ he asked. ‘Your husband and children?’

‘I’d die for them,’ she said. ‘Is that love? I wouldn’t even have to think about it. If it was a matter of taking a bullet or swallowing poison or walking into a burning room or whatever. If they could live, I’d do it. Although I’m scared of pain. I’d probably crack under torture and betray them.’

‘You’ve thought about it.’

‘Over and over,’ she said. ‘But,’ and her smile fell. ‘One of my children, one of my sons, I find I don’t love as much. In fact, as he grows up and becomes more and more his own person, I find I love him less and less.’

‘He’s a teenager. It’ll pass.’

‘They all are. It’s not that. He’s simply become someone I wouldn’t think of getting to know if we weren’t related.

I’d still die for him but … I don’t like him. Did your mother like you? Of course she did. I’m unnatural.’

‘Actually I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘She was ill so often when we were small and her illness could make her pretty scary so when we weren’t looking after her we were being frightened by her. Not much room in that equation for like or love. And now that I know she was pregnant with me when she married, I think she probably resented me when I was a baby. If I hadn’t come along, she’d have been free.’

‘Not every maiden’s prayer back then.’

‘No, but she wasn’t your average … She ended up so hemmed in by marriage and kids and … She was such a wild child. I don’t know why she stayed, when I think about it.’

‘Did she have affairs?’

‘If she did, she was very discreet. Everyone knows everyone else where they lived.’

‘Was she happy?’

‘She was bipolar so happiness didn’t come into it. She was often high, often wildly elated, which could make her fun to be around but I don’t think she was ever steadily content. Especially later on, once we’d left home.’

And prompted by deft questions, he told her a little of the saga of the Middletons, about the crises Rachel suffered after all but one of her births, about the trips into hospital, the painting, about Petroc, about Morwenna. He didn’t go into much detail – he knew of old that people unfamiliar with the story tended to be shocked if told too much so he sketched things in and left a lot out. But he was still surprised to notice tears in her eyes.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘That’s so sad.’

‘I suppose when it’s all you’ve known it seems fairly normal. Well, no. Not normal but … acceptable.’

‘Children are shockingly durable. Mine have had such an easy ride so far that I worry. They need a few shocks to toughen them up and make them less vulnerable. I bet your wife thought she was rescuing you.’ She leant forward, resting her keen, clever face on her hands in a way that made him resent having to talk about Lizzy, which in turn made him spiteful and he found himself telling all about Lizzy and her campaign to get pregnant.

This seemed to embarrass her in a way that the earlier details had not and she sat back and steered the conversation into cooler waters.

Not long afterwards there was a pause during which he stared at her in a way that wasn’t conversational and she stared right back. Then she said, quite simply, ‘Shall we go up?’

They had paid for the meal with a pair of cards, earlier, so they left the table almost at once and headed upstairs. It was only when they were climbing the stairs and he asked what floor she was on that she admitted to having no room of her own yet.

‘Oh,’ was all he could think to say and continued to his room where he let her in and they fell on one another without another word.

Of course it was unlike the sex he normally had because it wasn’t with Lizzy but it was different too in that the woman insisted on total darkness and silence whereas Lizzy liked a light on, however dimly, and tended to talk a lot. She was taller, too, and thinner. The darkness was strange. It was the utter darkness of a well-curtained hotel room and yet he rapidly found that he was effectively seeing her with his hands.

‘Christ,’ she sighed when it was over. ‘Does she like it like that?’

‘Like what?’

‘Well … You’re pretty rough.’

‘Am I? Sorry.’

‘No. It’s just that … You’ve been married a while and … There are other ways.’

And at the point where he would usually have given Lizzy one last kiss then fallen asleep, she began to kiss and touch him in a way that got them starting all over again. She kept the light off only this time she talked. In fact she proceeded to teach him several explicitly practical lessons.

When he woke thirsty a few hours later and stumbled to the bathroom for a drink, he found his cock and balls were aching from use in a way he had last experienced in the first solitary frenzies of adolescence.

When he woke again, the curtains were half-drawn and she was singing quietly to herself in the bath. He was shy of going in there to join her, although the husky sound of her voice, or the quantities of water he had drunk at the sink earlier, were making him hard again. He pretended to doze as she dried herself and dressed but she wasn’t fooled because she came and sat on the end of the bed eventually and spoke to him as though she knew he was wide awake already.

‘Will you tell her about this?’

‘God,’ he said, sitting up. ‘Morning. Probably.’

‘Why?’

‘I never lie to her.’

‘Ah yes. Congenitally incapable. But why?’

‘I owe it to her.’

‘So that she can be upset? It’s your problem surely, not hers, if you feel guilty. Why spread it around?’

‘So you won’t tell your husband?’

She chuckled. ‘Of course not. He’d be terribly upset and so should I. I think it’s a peculiarly male syndrome, this need to tell. When you still love your wives, that is. It’s totally illogical, when you stop to analyse it. Anyway.’ She held one of his feet that was sticking out from the bedding and gave it a gentle shake. ‘You’re man enough to carry the burden on your own. I’m going in search of breakfast. Thanks for a lovely, unexpected evening.’ She bent over to kiss his big toe. ‘I’ve left cash for my share of the room.’

‘But …’

‘I insist. It’s a dignity thing. Bye.’

She gave his foot another squeeze and left.

He climbed out of bed soon afterwards and was shocked to see it was already ten o’clock. He had missed the first train that connected through to Penzance and, unless he wanted a long wait in Reading, there was no point walking down to the station until past noon. He bathed, breakfasted on the room’s ration of instant coffee and shortbread fingers and checked out, causing some confusion by his insistence on paying part of the bill with the notes the woman had left behind.

He thought about dropping by the Shepherds’ house once more to say a second goodbye to the waspish Niobe then realized there was no point. Old instinct diverted him instead into the Friends’ Meeting House. It was about two minutes before eleven so he just had time to slip into the Meeting room and take a seat in the circle before the door was closed. It was far better subscribed than Penzance Meeting. There were perhaps thirty people in the room. Including her.

He saw her almost at once, probably because she had seen him coming in and was still looking at him as he automatically ran his eyes around the room on taking his seat. She smiled at him then looked down at her hands which she held loosely clasped in her lap. He felt a jolt of panic at first, but as he breathed deeply and began to listen to the room growing quiet about them he saw there was nothing to fear. Nobody here knew him and it was quite as possible that she was a stranger here too. And even if they were known, there was nothing to connect them. They were among Friends.

He couldn’t resist looking at her again, less obviously. She was not beautiful, he saw, but she had a sort of clean clarity to her. If one were casting actors to play Quakers in a film, hers was the kind of face one would look for. She was not a voluptuous seductress nor was she a hypocrite. If asked, she would have admitted that she spent last night with a man who wasn’t her husband because it felt good and (perhaps) she liked him but insisted that this had no bearing on her love for her husband or the truthfulness with which she aspired to lead her life.

It crossed his mind that she was so matter-of-fact about their casual adultery she was capable of standing now and sharing with the Meeting her deep sense that the pleasures of sex were God-given.

But of course she didn’t. In fact no one spoke. It was one of those rare, lovely hours he cherished and when he finally reached home that night he would tell Lizzy about it. About the serene pleasure of sitting in a roomful of thoughtful people for a whole hour without a word being said. A roomful of strangers.

When the hour finished and suddenly people were shaking hands around the circle, Garfield found his mind had become completely disengaged from the room and had been thinking intensely about Rachel and what her life must have been like before his father found her in this cold, landlocked city. He readjusted to his surroundings slowly with the almost sickened feeling of someone abruptly woken from deep sleep, and was one of the last to stand and be sociable.

Trained by Antony’s example, it was normally a rule of his to accept a cup of coffee and make the effort to talk to at least one stranger before leaving. But he was anxious about his train. He was about to slip away when the man who had been sitting beside him and who shook his hand at the end caught him gently by the elbow and said, ‘Now do you two know each other?’ and brought him face to face with the woman.

‘Oh yes,’ she said with a kind smile. ‘We’re old friends.’

‘How are you?’ Garfield asked her as she shook his hand.

‘I’m very well,’ she said. ‘Thank you. And you?’

‘Me too,’ he said and found he was grinning. ‘I have a train to catch,’ he added, as much to the man beside them as to her.

‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘Now you’re not to worry so. Everything will be fine. You’ll see.’

‘Will it?’

‘I’m a bit of a witch,’ she said. ‘Trust me. Go well.’

He had a powerful sense of her blessing as he left the building. It was as though she had tucked something warm into his breast pocket and its benign heat suffused him as he walked and induced a mild euphoria. When his mobile vibrated and it was Lizzy to say she had just left Falmouth Meeting and was missing him he said, ‘Me too,’ and found he meant it.

They chatted on the phone about this and that as he walked past Worcester and through the abruptly less charming, traffic-clogged area around the station. When she asked him about meeting his real father and he told her she said, ‘A bit of an anticlimax, then.’

He said, ‘Yes and no. It’s changed things a bit. I think I want to go back into law. Do legal-aid work around Falmouth and Truro. Would you mind?’

She laughed. ‘Of course I wouldn’t.’

‘But your dad’s business …’

‘Was his, not yours. And it was failing anyway when you took it over from him. You must do what you’re best at.’

‘You’re sure? You’re not just saying that?’

‘Course not. It was London and all those fat-cat clients that didn’t suit you, I think. Not law.’

‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ he said.

‘What? You’re cracking up a bit.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’