I had nothing further to say, at least until I’d thought about it all some more, which Damian seemed to understand and did not wish to challenge. He pulled himself unsteadily to his feet. ‘I’m going to bed now. I haven’t been up as late as this for months. You will find the list in an envelope in your room. If you wish, we can discuss it some more tomorrow morning before you go. At the risk of sounding vulgar, as you would say, you’ll also find a credit card, which will cover any expenses you care to charge on it during your enquiries. I will not question whatever you choose to use it for.’

This last detail actively annoyed me as it was deliberately phrased in a manner designed to make me think him generous. But nothing about this commission was generous. It was a hideous imposition. ‘I haven’t agreed yet,’ I said.

‘I hope you will.’ He was at the door when he stopped. ‘Do you ever see her now?’ he asked, confident that I would require no prompting as to the object of his enquiry. Which was correct.

‘No. Not really.’ I thought for a painful moment. ‘Very occasionally, at a party or a wedding or something. But not really.’

‘You aren’t enemies?’

‘Oh, no. We smile. And even talk. We’re certainly not enemies. We’re not anything.’

He hesitated, as if he were pondering whether to go down this path. ‘You know I was mad.’

‘Yes.’

‘But I want you to understand that I know it, too. I went completely mad.’ He paused, as if I might come in with some suitable response. But there wasn’t one. ‘Would it help if I said I was sorry?’ he asked.

‘Not terribly.’

He nodded, absorbing the information. We both knew there was nothing further to add. ‘Stay down here as long as you like. Have some more whisky and look at the books. Some of them will interest you.’

But I wasn’t quite finished. ‘Why have you left it until now?’ I said. ‘Why didn’t you make enquiries when you first got the letter?’

This did make him pause and ponder, as the light from the hall came through the now open door and deepened the lines of his ravaged face. Presumably he asked himself the same question a thousand times a day. ‘I don’t know. Not completely. Maybe I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone feeling they had a claim against me. I didn’t see how I could find and identify them without giving them some power. And I’d never really wanted a child. Which is probably why I wouldn’t listen to my wife’s pleadings. It wasn’t one of my ambitions. I don’t think I was ever naturally paternal.’

‘Yet now you are prepared to give this unknown stranger enough money to build a small industrial town. Why? What’s changed?’

Damian thought for a moment and a tiny sigh made his thin shoulders rise and fall. The jacket, which must once have fitted flawlessly, flapped loosely around his shrivelled frame. ‘I’m dying and I have no beliefs,’ he said simply. ‘This is my only chance of immortality.’

Then he was gone and I was left to enjoy his library alone.

TWO

I have never been a good judge of character. My impressions at first meeting are almost invariably wrong. Although, human nature being what it is, many years had to pass before I could bring myself to admit it. When I was young I thought I had a marvellous instinct to tell good from bad, fine from shoddy, sacred from profane. Damian Baxter, by contrast, was an expert at assessment. He knew at once I was a patsy.

As it happens, we had both gone up to Cambridge in September 1967, but we were in different colleges and we moved in different crowds, so it was not until the beginning of the summer term of 1968, in early May I think, that our paths first crossed, at a party in the Fellows’ Quadrangle of my college, where I was no doubt showing off. I was nineteen and in that heady stage of life for someone like me, at least for someone like me then, when you suddenly realise that the world is more complicated than you had supposed, that there is in fact a vast assortment of people and opportunities on offer, and you will not be obliged to continue forever in the narrow channel of boarding school and county, which was all that that my so-called ‘privileged’ upbringing had yielded thus far. I would not say that I was ever antisocial but nor would I claim much social success before that time. I had been rather overshadowed by handsome and witty cousins, and since I possessed neither looks nor a trace of charisma to offset this, there wasn’t much I could do to make my presence felt.

My dear mother understood my predicament, which she was obliged to witness silently and painfully for years, but found there was little she could do to remedy it. Until, seeing the burgeoning confidence that admission to university had brought, she decided to take advantage of it to promote a spirit of adventure within me, providing introductions to London friends with suitably aged daughters. Surprisingly perhaps, I had followed her lead and begun to construct a new social group for myself, where I would have no more depressing comparisons to contend with and where I could, to an extent anyway, reinvent myself.

It would seem odd to today’s young that I should have allowed myself to be so parentally steered, but things were different forty years ago. To start with, people were not then afraid of getting older. Our strange, patronising culture, where middle-aged television presenters dishonestly pretend to share the tastes and prejudices of their teenage audience in order to gain their trust, had not arrived. In short, in this as in so many areas, we did not think in the way that people think today. Of course, we were divided by political opinions and class and, to a lesser extent than now, religion, but the key difference, from today’s viewpoint, is not between the Right and the Left, or the aristocratic and the ordinary, but between the generation of 1968 and the people of four decades later.

In my world, parents in the early Sixties still arranged their children’s lives to an extraordinary extent, settling between themselves when parties would be given and at which houses during the school holidays, what subjects their offspring would study at school; what careers they should pursue after university; above all, what friends they would spend time with. It wasn’t, on the whole, tyrannical but we did not much challenge our parents’ veto when it was exercised. I remember a local baronet’s heir, frequently drunk and invariably rude, and for these reasons beguiling to me and my sister and repulsive to our parents, who was actually forbidden entry to our house by my father, ‘except where his absence would cause comment.’ Can such a phrase really have been spoken within living memory? I know we laughed about this rule even then. But we did not break it. In short, we were a product of our backgrounds in a way that would be rare today. One hears people wonder about the collapse of parental authority. Was it deliberately engineered as the right-wing press would have us believe? Or did it just happen because it was right for the time, like the internal combustion engine or penicillin? Either way, it has vanished from whole chunks of our society, gone, like the snows of yesteryear.

At any rate, to resume, that spring there was a drinks party in the Fellows’ Quadrangle to which I’d been invited for some reason. I cannot now say if it was an official function or a private bash, but anyway there we all were, feeling clever and chosen, and probably still enjoying the college’s reputation for being ‘rather smart.’ How pitiful such mini-vanities seem, viewed from the tired vale of the middle years, but I don’t believe there was much harm in us, really. We thought we were grown up, which we weren’t, and posh, which we weren’t very, and that people would be glad to know us. I say this although, after my painful youth, I still preserved that all too familiar blend of pride and terror, that is so characteristic of the late teens, when nose-in-air snobbery goes hand in hand with social paranoia. Presumably it was this contradictory mixture that made me so vulnerable to attack.