If anyone was to blame, it was Vernon. Clive had traveled this line often in the past and had never felt bleak about the view. He couldn’t put it down to chewing gum or a mislaid pen. Their row of the evening before was still sounding in his ears, and he worried that the echoes would pursue him into the mountains and destroy his peace. And it was hardly just a clash of voices he still carried with him, it was growing dismay at his friend’s behavior, and a gathering sense that he had never really known Vernon at all. He turned away from the window. To think, only the week before he had made a most unusual and intimate request of his friend. What a mistake that had been, especially now that the sensation in his left hand had vanished completely. Just a foolish anxiety brought on by Molly’s funeral. One of those occasional bouts of fearing death. But how vulnerable he had made himself that night. It was no comfort that Vernon had asked the same for himself; all it had cost him was a scribbled note pushed through the door. And perhaps that was typical of a certain… imbalance in their friendship that had always been there and that Clive had been aware of somewhere in his heart and had always pushed away, disliking himself for unworthy thoughts. Until now. Yes, a certain lopsidedness in their friendship, which, if he cared to consider, made last night’s confrontation less surprising.

There was the time, for example, way back, when Vernon stayed for a year and never once offered to pay rent. And was it not generally true that over the years it had been Clive rather than Vernon who had provided the music—in every sense? The wine, the food, the house, the musicians and other interesting company, the initiatives that took Vernon to rented houses with lively friends in Scotland, the mountains of northern Greece, and the shores of Long Island. When had Vernon ever proposed and arranged some fascinating pleasure? When had Clive last been a guest in Vernon’s house? Three or four years ago, perhaps. Why had he never properly acknowledged the act of friendship that lay behind his borrowing a large sum to see Vernon through a difficult time? When Vernon had had an infection of the spine, Clive had visited almost every day; when Clive had slipped on the pavement outside his house and broken his ankle, Vernon had sent his secretary round with a bag of books from the Judges books page slush pile.

Put most crudely, what did he, Clive, really derive from this friendship? He had given, but what had he ever received? What bound them? They had Molly in common, there were the accumulated years and the habits of friendship, but there was really nothing at its center, nothing for Clive. A generous explanation for the imbalance might have evoked Vernon’s passivity and self-absorption. Now, after last night, Clive was inclined to see these as merely elements of a larger fact—Vernon’s lack of principle.

Outside the compartment window, unseen by Clive, a deciduous woodland slid by, its winter geometry silvered by unmelted frost. Farther on, a slow river eased through brown fringes of sedge, and beyond the floodplain, icy pastures were laced with dry-stone walls. On the edges of a rusty-looking town, an expanse of industrial wasteland was being returned to forest; saplings in plastic tubes stretched almost to the horizon, where bulldozers were spreading topsoil. But Clive stared ahead at the empty seat opposite, lost to the self-punishing convolutions of his fervent social accounting, unknowingly bending and coloring the past through the prism of his unhappiness. Other thoughts diverted him occasionally, and for periods he read, but this was the theme of his northward journey, the long and studied redefinition of a friendship.

In Penrith some hours later, it was a great relief to step away from this brooding and go along the platform with his bags in search of a taxi. It was over twenty miles to Stonethwaite, and he was happy to lose himself in small talk with the driver. Because it was midweek and out of season, Clive was the hotel’s only guest. He had asked for the room he had taken three or four times before, the only one with a table to work at.

Despite the cold, he opened the window wide so he could breathe the distinctive winter Lakeland air while he unpacked—peaty water, wet rock, mossy earth. He ate alone in the bar under the gaze of a stuffed fox mounted in a glass case, frozen in a predatory crouch. After a short walk in total darkness round the edges of the hotel car park, he went back indoors, said goodnight to his waitress, and returned to his tiny room. He read for an hour and then lay in darkness, listening to the swollen crashing beck, knowing that his subject was bound to return and that it would be better to indulge it now than take it with him on his walk the next day. It wasn’t the disillusionment that forced itself on him now. There were his memories of the conversation, and then something beyond—what had been said, and then what he would like to have said to Vernon now that he had had hours to reflect. It was remembering, and it was also fantasizing: he imagined a drama in which he gave himself all the best lines, resonant lines of sad reasonableness whose indictments were all the more severe and unanswerable for their compression and emotional restraint.

What actually happened was this: Vernon phoned in the late morning, using words so close to those Clive had spoken the week before that they seemed like conscious quotation, a playful calling in of a debt. Vernon had to talk to him, it was very pressing, the phone wouldn’t do, he had to see him, it had to be today.

Clive hesitated. He had intended to catch the afternoon train to Penrith, but he said, “Well, come round and I’ll make supper.”

He rearranged his travel plans, brought up two good burgundies from the cellar, and cooked. Vernon arrived an hour late, and Clive’s first impression was that his friend had lost weight. His face was long and thin and unshaved, his overcoat looked many sizes too large, and when he set down his briefcase to accept a glass of wine his hand was trembling.

He downed the Chambertin Clos de Beze like a lager and said, “What a week, what a terrible week.” He held out his glass for a refill, and Clive, relieved that he had not started with the Richebourg, obliged.

“We were in court three hours this morning and we won. You’d think that would be the end of it. But the whole staffs against me, almost all of them. The building’s in an uproar. It’s a marvel we got a paper out tonight. There’s a chapel meeting going on now and they’re certain to pass a motion of no confidence in me. Management and the board are standing firm, so that’s fine. It’s a fight to the death.”

Clive gestured toward a chair, and Vernon flopped into it, put his elbows on the kitchen table, covered his face with his hands, and wailed, “These prissy bastards! I’m trying to save their arse-wipe newspaper and their piss-pot jobs. They’d rather lose everything than dangle a single fucking modifier. They don’t live in the real world. They deserve to starve.”

Clive had no idea what Vernon was talking about, but he said nothing. Vernon’s glass was empty again, so Clive filled it and turned away to lift two poussins from the oven. Vernon heaved his briefcase onto his lap. Before opening it, he took a deep, calming breath and another slug of the Chambertin. He sprang the catches, hesitated, and spoke in a lower voice.

“Look, I’d like your view on this, not just because you’ve got a personal connection and you already know a little about it. It’s because you’re not in the business and I need an outsider’s view. I think I’m going mad…”

This last he was murmuring to himself as he delved into the case and produced a large cardboard-backed envelope, from which he pulled three black-and-white photographs. Clive turned the heat off under the saucepans and sat down. The first photograph Vernon put in his hands showed Julian Garmony in a plain three-quarter-length dress, posing catwalk style, with arms pushing away a little from his body and one foot set in front of the other, knees slightly crooked. The false breasts under the dress were small, and the edge of one bra strap was visible. The face was made up, but not overly so, for his natural pallor served him well, and lipstick had bestowed a bow of sensuality on the unkind, narrow lips. The hair was distinctively Garmony’s, short, wavy, and side-parted, so that his appearance was both manicured and dissolute, and faintly bovine. This was not something that could ever be passed off as fancy dress, or a lark in front of the camera. The strained, self-absorbed expression was that of a man revealed in a sexual state. The strong gaze into the lens was consciously seductive. The lighting was soft, and cleverly done.