‘I was not aware that you ventured out alone,’ she said. ‘Are you lost?’ She smiled a glittering smile and let out a short laugh.

He bowed to her and noticed as he lifted his head that she knew the other gentleman. Both she and the dealer seemed anxious about his presence. When Henry looked towards him, he saw that in those seconds between his bow and his turning of the head, something urgent and almost alarmed had passed in glances between Lady Wolseley and the gentleman.

‘Most of the objects in here are beyond your means,’ she said to Henry. Both of them knew instantly that the remark, although meant as a joke, was too brusque and too sharp.

‘A poor man can always look,’ he said, waiting for her to retrieve the situation and wondering how she would do so.

‘Come then and I will show you,’ she said. She led him down the stairs, calling for another lamp.

He knew that it was a signal for the gentleman to go and was not surprised to hear the front door of the antique shop being shut once more. As Lady Wolseley ordered the lamp to be placed on an Italian cabinet, he wondered who the gentleman was and why they had not been introduced, and why the strain in the room had been so palpable and the encounter, considering Lady Wolseley’s great social experience, so badly managed. Could Lady Wolseley, he wondered, have come close to compromising herself in an antique shop in London on an ordinary winter’s afternoon? And what form would such a compromise take? And in what way was the dealer implicated? Both Lady Wolseley and the dealer now began to extol the virtues and beauties of the cabinet, Lady Wolseley agreeing vehemently with each phrase the dealer uttered, repeating some of them for emphasis, both of them insisting that a price could not even be mentioned, it would cause shock or scandal, it had better remain unknown to the current visitor who loved beauty but had limited means.

As they both spoke, and then as the dealer fell silent and the conversation was carried by Lady Wolseley, Henry was sure that he had understood perfectly the outlines of the scene just witnessed but not its meaning. Lady Wolseley had arranged to meet a gentleman here, but that alone meant nothing, as she moved freely in London and had taken Henry shopping without the smallest hesitation. The strain had arisen from her unwillingness to greet the gentleman or introduce him. Henry could make no sense of this, could not fathom why she had not either ignored the man totally or made light of knowing him. The conversation which resumed between Lady Wolseley and the dealer seemed to gather up silences and fill them noisily. He realized that he had witnessed a strange London moment whose essences belonged to others and would be kept from him no matter how much he speculated and how long their awkward loitering in the antique shop went on.

While walking up the steps towards the front part of the shop, his eye was caught by the tapestry, which had been moved since his last visit. Now it seemed even more rich and more beautiful. His two companions stopped behind him. He presumed that they too would see the pure delicacy of the colouring, the bright threads working against the faded, the texture suggesting a vast realm long gone.

‘Is it eighteenth century?’ he asked.

‘Look a little and perhaps you’ll make out,’ Lady Wolseley said.

He looked again as the dealer brought the lamp nearer.

‘Do you like it?’ he asked her, wondering if she remembered seeing it on their previous visit.

‘I don’t think “like” is quite the word,’ she said. ‘It’s flawed. It’s been restored, some of the work is recent. Can’t you see?’

He studied it more carefully, following the pink and yellow threads which seemed to him faded too, even though they stood out against the rest of the work.

‘It was made to fool us all,’ Lady Wolseley said.

‘It’s quite striking, quite beautiful,’ Henry said as though he were speaking to himself.

‘Oh, if you don’t see the restoration in all its vulgarity, then you need me even more than you know,’ Lady Wolseley said. ‘You must under no circumstances ever venture out alone again.’

He would, he thought, return to buy the tapestry once a suitable length of time had elapsed.

HE WAS LOSING London; he put himself down for the Reform Club, joining the long list, knowing it would take many years and much attrition before his name would be at the top. He loved imagining a London life in the comfort of the Reform Club, the care and attention of the staff, and the vast city at his disposal. He had, he mused to himself, been exposed to London all his life, having been taken here at the age of six months on one of his father’s early quests for eternal wisdom, earthly satisfaction and something nameless and numinous which would always manage to evade him.

He knew, because his Aunt Kate had told him many times throughout his teenage years, that they had rented a cottage near the Great Park of Windsor and were the most fortunate of families, possessing two healthy boys whose daily antics held their parents and their aunt in thrall, and having enough money for Henry senior to pursue his private interests among the most famous minds of the age, to search for truth, and, if it could not be found, to make the journey towards it memorable and serious and worthwhile. Henry senior was interested in goodness, in the great good plan which God had set for man; each of us, he believed, must learn to decipher this plan, and live as though no one had ever lived before. His task, in reading and writing and talking and bringing up his children, was to reconcile the essential newness and goodness of each member of the human species with the darkness which lay all around and lurked within.

As Henry prepared to leave London, Edmund Gosse became a regular visitor, making sure as much as he could that he was not disturbing Henry, or outstaying the welcome which was generally extended to him. He had been reading one of the few copies of the writings of Henry James senior to have made its way across the Atlantic and he had also become interested, for reasons of his own, in childhood experience, especially experience in infancy, which he believed, as a result of a series of lectures he had attended, could affect behaviour more than was previously imagined. He became fascinated by the account he read by Henry’s father about a central experience in his life which had occurred in the house he had rented in the Great Park of Windsor.

His father had written of what happened to him in that cottage near the Park as a moment of revelation and exhilaration; he mentioned it often and Henry remembered that his mother’s face darkened each time the subject was rehearsed. Aunt Kate’s face darkened too, but it was she who had several times recounted the story to Henry, and there was, he remembered, in her expression a sense of satisfaction that the story could be told again and to as concerned and attentive a listener as young Henry.

Gosse had not known that Henry was an infant in the house when it happened. He had raised the subject merely to ask if it had affected Henry’s father’s subsequent behaviour. When he discovered that Henry and William were present, then he asked Henry, in a hushed and urgent tone, to tell him everything he knew about it, promising that it was neither for publication nor for dissemination. Henry pointed out that he was an infant and had no memory of it, and that his father’s account was in the book.

‘But it must have been spoken about in the family?’ Gosse asked.

‘Yes, my Aunt Kate spoke of it to me, but my mother disliked the subject.’

‘Your Aunt Kate was present when it occurred?’ Gosse asked.

Henry nodded.

‘How did she describe it?’ Gosse asked.

‘She was a great story-teller, so one cannot be sure of her veracity,’ Henry said.

‘But you must tell me what she said.’