No rehearsal this morning, so we stayed in bed – I made tea, and we sat propped up, searching our phones for stories about Mark. Why we needed to read them I’m not sure: perhaps knowing a famous person makes you part of the story, and you want whoever is telling it to see the point and get it right. The segment last night at the end of the News had been earnest but perfunctory, forty-five seconds from a young correspondent with no first-hand knowledge of the subject. It was confounding to learn about a friend’s death in this way. I muted the set, Richard put his arm round me, and we sat saying nothing as the cricket and then the weather came on.

Richard only met Mark once, at the ninetieth-birthday dinner at the Tate, where two hundred guests sat down in a room that was hung for the occasion with his own gifts. Mark looked and sounded frail when he made his speech, but we were all on his side, and he was modest and generous, toasting Cara too, who was one day older than him. I wasn’t sure, when we spoke briefly with them later, if they were wounded or quietly relieved that Giles wasn’t there.

In Mark Hadlow’s story, from the press point of view, there has always been an irksome absence of scandal – an ethical businessman, a major philanthropist, married to one woman for seventy years; not a hermit, indeed ‘a generous host’, but with no taste for the limelight: he was said to have turned down both a knighthood and a peerage, and none of the galleries and halls he endowed bears his own name. He can only be got at, for invasive gossip, through his children. Nobody has much on Lydia, except that she once appeared topless in a Warhol movie, and died in a car-crash in France five years ago. But Giles, of course, is everywhere, and so fiercely opposed to all his father stood for that Mark’s life-work is eclipsed by his son’s destructive career. ‘Mark Hadlow: Brexit Minister’s millionaire father dies,’ said the Times; while the Mail put Giles first in the sentence: ‘Giles Hadlow’s father dies at 94’. The photo of the two of them uneasily together dated from the 1980s. It would be mad to say Giles killed Mark, but I wondered what his feelings about him were now – continued defiance, or some kind of guilty grief?

‘Will you ring Cara?’ Richard said.

‘I ought to, yes,’ I said, but the question made me wonder: ours was a long and unshakable friendship, but I felt shy of ringing her up. ‘Or perhaps I’ll write her a letter’ – then felt there would be almost too much to say. I looked across at the mirror that reflected the bed, and seemed to frame us in a larger and more beautiful space. ‘To have money and do nothing but good with it – how rare is that?’

‘Well, pretty much unheard-of,’ said Richard.

I thought, inexactly, of everything Mark had done for me, even before our first meeting at Woolpeck in my early teens. I pictured myself on that sunny weekend, my anxiety dressed up as self-possession, my cleverness hidden by nerves from the people who were hoping to see it. ‘The plain fact is,’ I said, ‘he changed my life.’ I can cry at will, on camera or on stage, night after night; but now I surprised myself. ‘I can’t imagine where I’d be without him.’

‘Oh, love . . .’ said Richard, with a consoling rub. ‘He was like the father you never had, I sometimes think.’

‘We were never that close,’ I said, wary of this idea. ‘It was really just chance – if I hadn’t won the Hadlow Exhibition I would never have gone to that school.’

‘And you would never have met Giles.’

I thought of what Mum said, just before she died, when the campaign was launched: ‘To think we could all be at the mercy of your terrible friend!’

‘They won’t win, Mum,’ I’d said.

‘Well, it won’t affect me,’ she said, ‘I’ll be gone, but you – and Richard . . .’

I looked again in the mirror, at the two old men in bed. Now Mum’s gone, and Mark’s gone, and here we are, with Giles all over the papers, all over the country, tearing up our future and our hopes.

In the evening I found a photo of Mark online that must have dated from about the time I met him; it’s as sweetly breathtaking as seeing an unknown picture of myself as a young man: I’d forgotten that I’d known him like that. His mouth gives an impression of decisiveness, even impatience, that is qualified by the large, somehow humorous, brown eyes. His way of paying keen attention is at one with his need, once he’s done so, to move on to something else. The attachment close to love that I felt for him as a child survives and comes back to me clearly through the steady fondness of the later years, when the habit of friendship became a more prominent part of its meaning.

In your fifties and sixties your father-figures drop away – the ones who had licensed, enabled and witnessed your life – and no one can replace them. Roland, Raymond, Mark all gone – and no chance of becoming a father-figure myself. My two godsons are grown and married and fathers themselves by now, and we barely know each other; our rare meetings have terrific cordiality, we hug fiercely and grin across the gulf between their lives as businessmen and mine as a queer old puzzle. Great respect is shown to me, and my obscure achievements are referred to in an encouraging way, rather as if I was their godchild. Otherwise, I do my bits of teaching, and when I’m in a show I regale the young actors with old theatre gossip, and rehearse them surreptitiously, sometimes, backstage. My warmth is comradely, more than paternal – or amorous: I registered the point, a few years back, when my flirting became more alarming than seductive.

Now I’m two weeks into rehearsals for Bajazet at the Anvil – we gather in a room just down the road, a battered blue door between a butcher’s and an antique shop (‘That’s contemporary theatre for you,’ says Richard). I’m playing old Acomat, the Grand Vizier, a gift of a part, and wonder when I first used the phrase, ‘I’m playing old Someone’: a while ago now. The man in the Telegraph said last year I was ‘enjoying the golden autumn of my career’, though it feels to me more like a lucky run of character parts that make a quick mark. Directors have decided they can use me, and Martin my agent has slipped into the role of a man who believed in me all along.

I would normally be off the book by now – never before rehearsals, something Ray taught me forty years ago: best to ‘seal in’ the lines in the first week or two as you’ll speak them to these particular actors. I open the play and have six pages of blank verse in the first ten minutes – complicated stuff about plots, armies and empires which the audience, in their first eager ignorance, will take in intently, knowing their evening depends on it. It’s just me and my confidant, Osmin, played by Keith Mackle, a young mixed-race actor (Glasgow, Ghana) who reminds me of Hector in his handsomeness and concentration; and he’s absolutely patient when I call for a prompt (it’s still early days) or jump by mistake into a later speech about the Babylonian troops. The fact is my famous memory’s not quite what it was. I remember yesterday in detail, and fifty years ago with new and unexpected clarity, but a small mental floater blurs and half obscures last week. I leave my script on a chair at the start, then pick it up and carry it round like someone else.

I did send Cara a letter, and heard nothing, and then in the final week of the play she rang: she was frank, and told me she’d had cancer, an operation on her throat six weeks before Mark died. ‘I sound different,’ she said, ‘I know.’ ‘Not to me,’ I said with the sort of chivalry she’d never had much time for. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s nice of you to say so.’ I thought her speech was very slightly altered, or obstructed, and with an elderly sense of effort to it. She said, ‘Can you come for lunch tomorrow? – or any day, really,’ an unexpected emptiness. I went round three days later, and by myself.

All my tender understandings about Mum in her last years were available to me, and the competence with very old people that I’d learned with her. But of course Cara wasn’t Mum. With Cara there was candour, but not intimacy – with its indulgence of weakness; and besides she had people to look after her. I was let into the house by a quiet young woman who took my coat and showed me through to the drawing room, with its tall windows on to the garden and its large abstract paintings facing each other down across the white carpet. Cara was sitting by the fire with her glasses on her nose, apparently texting; she frowned at the phone as she poked the letters. I had a moment then to take in how she looked – the wide white brow, with a red turban wrapping her head, a silk scarf round her neck, her mouth on the right side slightly drawn back, the square well-known face both softer and gaunter. ‘Hello!’ she said, with touching warmth, not looking up, then pressed Send and reached her hand out to me. I went over, and kissed her on the cheek, and she gripped my arm for a second as I did so.

‘You don’t drink, I know,’ she said.

‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t drink a lot.’

‘I mean, do have something, I just can’t at the moment.’

The girl was hovering. ‘Perhaps just some water?’ I said. So we both had that, and I sat down and we looked at each other. My look was sympathetic, I hoped, and humorous, hers somehow abstract – I couldn’t tell where she would want to begin.

‘Have you been able to work?’ I said.

‘Oh, I can’t paint now,’ she said, and raised her right hand diffidently, it seemed, the knuckles large and white and the fingers hard to straighten. ‘I draw a little, but it’s not up to much.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I remember your work so well.’

‘You were always nice about it,’ she said.

‘Well, not just me,’ I said, aware though that I’d liked it mainly because I knew her.

I wanted to find out about Mark’s funeral, from an odd knot of feelings – curiosity, and regret that I hadn’t been there, and an awful inadmissible pique that I hadn’t been invited. ‘Oh, it was quite private,’ Cara said, ‘which was what Mark wanted.’

‘I completely understand.’

‘And I wasn’t well, I couldn’t have managed anything more. It was really just family – and three or four others.’

‘Of course,’ I said lightly.

‘We had some Bach, and some Rameau, I think it was. Mark’s old friend Mike Kidstow, do you know, gave the address.’

‘Well, I know who you mean,’ I said, ‘I’ve never met him.’

‘No hymns or anything, naturally. Giles gave a short reading.’

‘Ah, I wondered . . .’

She looked at me. ‘He speaks very well.’

‘Yes, he does,’ I said, and felt I could add, ‘he’s had plenty of practice!’

‘Well, that was the thing, Dave, of course, we couldn’t have crowds, and the press all over us.’

‘No, I do see.’

‘They kept all the photographers outside the gates at the crematorium.’

‘Oh, that was good.’

‘I mean, it wasn’t Mark they were there for . . . We left in a blizzard of flashlights.’ She raised her bent hand to shade her eyes.

We had lunch in the dining room, which I remembered as much gloomier, and with different pictures: there was that restless Hadlow sense that things could always be changed, and improved. Cara had a stick – I offered her an arm as we went through but she said quietly, ‘I’m all right.’ We sat down face to face at one end of the long and extendable table – a white plaster cast of some empty space, a carton or cupboard perhaps, by Rachel Whiteread was centred at the other end. I felt I might find this sequence of huge off-white rooms a bit chilly, with no husband around.

We were served by a young man called Rihaan, who murmured now and then in Cara’s ear, and seemed to play a larger part in her care. I remembered Ashok here, decades ago, the smile of allegiance and the sense too that we all had our place. Cara wanted proper attention but no fuss; the meal was simple and digestible, sole, new potatoes, a green salad, a jug of water to drink. She might have been a very rich woman but she was also a farmer’s daughter, who’d never lost the hatred of waste of all who had lived through the War.

I spoke warmly about the huge New Painting from Europe show at the Hayward, that Mark had been the invisible godfather to.

‘I’m so glad you saw it, that was really his last great hurrah.’

‘Oh, it was marvellous,’ I said, in the committed tone of the Hadlows themselves around contemporary art. ‘An amazing achievement.’ There had been new work from all twenty-eight member states in the EU – the idea was exemplary, high-minded, even visionary, though as Richard said you couldn’t help wishing about halfway through that several more countries had done a Brexit.

A little later she said, ‘We’ve known each other a long time, Dave.’

‘Fifty . . . -four years,’ I said.

‘I’m glad we’ve stayed in touch.’

‘Oh, me too!’ Like Mark, she’d always shushed away my words of gratitude, but I felt now some unaffected statement might console her. I glanced at her wide downturned face, lit strongly from the right by the large window. ‘I always say how much I owe to you and Mark – meeting you really changed my life.’ She scowled, just for a moment, at this, but I felt she allowed it too.

‘You do know, Dave, Mark was always so proud of you, and interested by all you did. It was wonderful for us to see you make a success of things, not at all easy, I know, especially early on.’

‘Well, thank you!’ It wasn’t the first time she’d said this, in almost the same words, but the repetition was none the less touching – I felt to her it still had the purpose and the warmth of something said for the first time. ‘That means a great deal to me.’

‘I feel awful to have missed this Racine play – you’ve had marvellous reviews.’

‘Oh, you mustn’t worry about that,’ I said.

‘Well . . .’ and she smiled with a touching new note of uncertainty. ‘I do sometimes wonder what you made of us all, back then.’

‘Well, it was a great thing to stay at Woolpeck with you all.’

She blinked, perhaps trying to picture it. ‘Did you enjoy it? I remember having to bandage you up, after one of the Minister’s more violent episodes.’

‘Oh, god . . .’ I said, but glad of the unexpected joke.

‘Before you knew us, I think, we had happier times there. But Giles and Lydia never saw eye to eye, and they were both difficult teenagers, in a way I’m fairly sure you weren’t.’

‘No, but I got difficult a bit later on . . .’

‘You were very much closer to your mother,’ Cara said. ‘I think, in some way that I’ll never understand, Mark and I were not good parents to our children.’

‘Cara, you were dream parents!’ I said.

She looked at me. ‘Oh dear, what a melancholy conversation. I’m sorry.’ I wondered again then if she had people to talk to, in the thin social air of her nineties.

The pudding was a large tart made with lemon curd. ‘A favourite of yours, I remember,’ Cara said, as Rihaan cut a thin slice for her, and set a good third of the remainder in front of me, with a dollop of white whipped cream on top.

‘Amazing memory you have,’ I said – better, really, than mine. I hadn’t eaten lemon curd for at least thirty years, but I smiled and squared up to it, in a mime of my larger gratitude.

We had coffee after lunch in a sleek glass cube that projected into the garden. Cara sat down with a grunt, propped her stick beside her chair, and peered out abstractedly at the lawn as the coffee was poured. I saw we could easily part without discussing the Minister further, but both of us feeling perhaps that we’d missed a chance or dodged a responsibility.

‘Do you ever go to Woolpeck now?’ I said.

‘Oh . . . not for some years,’ said Cara, ‘not since my brother Peter died. Thank you . . .’ as the door was closed again. ‘I can’t, Dave, really . . . you know.’

‘But it was your home,’ I said.

‘It was, long ago – well, I was born there, as you may know. But it’s Giles’s now.’

‘I wonder if he’s there very much?’ I said. I was indignant about it, on her behalf, and also somehow on mine. I didn’t know if Cara had seen him on Newsnight, in a piece about the impact of Brexit on agriculture, up by the Rings in a green Barbour and holding an ashplant, his hair whipped about by the wind. ‘I farm all this land,’ he said, ‘as far as you can see.’ ‘Really?’ said the interviewer – the camera panning slowly across the vast expanse of the Vale. ‘In that direction,’ Giles said, the stick now pointing to the long wood half a mile away.

‘Laura doesn’t care for it, I gather. He has a very good farm manager, of course.’

‘To deal with all the EU subsidies . . .’

‘Well, quite,’ said Cara in a murmur. She was really beyond wondering at the madness of it all.

I felt she was opening the way to more talk about Giles. In my life he had come and gone and then alas come back, but there were whole years when I barely thought of him at all; Cara must have thought about him many times a day. ‘But tell me, Dave’ – and she looked up from her cup and held my eye – ‘if you think back, years ago, to when we all first met, are you surprised by how Giles’s career turned out?’

I laughed for half a second. Cara valued frankness, but she hardly hoped to hear that her son had been a swine all along. ‘I think perhaps he always had a taste for power, yes, and punishing his fellow man.’

‘He was an authoritarian, would you say, even then.’

‘I remember he simply loved being a prefect. And he minded very much that he was never head boy.’

‘Well, he’s still not that,’ said Cara, and we both made a face at the thought, the possibility. ‘But he was intelligent, wasn’t he?’ It was as if she hadn’t known him at all, or deeply doubted what she did know.

‘I think so . . .’ I said. ‘I don’t remember how he did at Oxford.’

She looked down. ‘Well, he was very caught up in politics, wasn’t he, the Union and so forth. But he scraped a Second, I think.’

‘Right . . .’ I said warily. I didn’t have much faith in these simple searches for a key to Giles’s behaviour – and I’m not sure they satisfied Cara, though talking things over perhaps eased her feelings, the long-term dismay beneath the later grief.