“It’s an odd thing to ask, I know. It’s also illegal in this country, and I wouldn’t want you to put yourself on the wrong side of the law, assuming, of course, you were to say yes. But there are ways, and there are places, and if it came to it, I’d want you to get me there on a plane. It’s a heavy responsibility, something I could only—ask of a close friend like yourself. All I can say is that I’m not in a state of panic or anything. I have given it a lot of thought.”

Then, because Vernon still sat in silence, staring, he added with some embarrassment, “Well, there it is.”

Vernon set down his glass and scratched his head, and then stood.

“You don’t want to talk about this scare you’ve had?”

“Absolutely not.”

Vernon glanced at his watch. He was late for George. He said, “Well, look, it’s quite a thing you’re asking me. It needs some thought.”

Clive nodded. Vernon moved toward the door and led the way down the stairs. In the hallway they embraced again. Clive opened the door, and Vernon stepped out into the night.

“I’ll need to think about it.”

“Quite so. Thanks for coming.”

Both men accepted that the nature of the request, its intimacy and self-conscious reflection on their friendship, had created, for the moment, an uncomfortable emotional proximity, which was best dealt with by their parting without another word, Vernon walking quickly up the street in search of a taxi and Clive going back up the stairs to his piano.

Lane himself opened the door of his Holland Park mansion.

“You’re late.”

Vernon, who assumed that George was trying on the part of press lord summoning his editor, declined to apologize or even reply and followed his host across a bright hallway into the living room. Fortunately, there was nothing here to remind Vernon of Molly. The room was furnished in what he had once heard her describe as the Buckingham Palace style: thick mustard-yellow carpets, big dusty-pink sofas and armchairs with raised patterns of vines and scrolls, brown oil paintings of racehorses at grass and reproduction Fragonards of bucolic ladies on swings in immense gilt frames, and the whole opulent emptiness overlit by lacquered brass lamps, George reached the massive brec-ciated marble surround of the coal-effect gas fire and turned.

“You’ll take a glass of port?”

Vernon realized that he had had nothing to eat since a cheese and lettuce sandwich at lunchtime. Why else would George’s pretentious construction have made him feel so irritable? And what was George doing wearing a silk dressing gown over his day clothes? The man was simply preposterous.

“Thanks. I will.”

They sat almost twenty feet apart, with the hissing fireplace between them. Had he been alone for half a minute, Vernon thought, he might have crawled over to the fender and knocked the right side of his head on it. Even in company now, he did not feel right.

“I’ve seen the circulation figures,” George said gravely. “Not good.”

“The rate of decline is slowing,” was Vernon’s automatic response, his mantra.

“But it’s still a decline.”

“These things take time to turn around.” Vernon tasted his port and protected himself with the recollection that George owned a mere one and a half percent of the Judge and knew nothing about the business. It was also useful to remember that his fortune, his publishing “empire,” was rooted in an energetic exploitation of the weak-headed: hidden numerical codes in the Bible foretold the future, the Incas hailed from outer space, the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the Second Coming, the Third Eye, the Seventh Seal, Hitler was alive and well in Peru. It was not easy to be lectured by George on the ways of the world.

“It seems to me,” he was saying, “that what you need now is one big story, something that’ll catch fire, something your opponents will have to run with just to keep up.”

What was needed for the circulation to stop going down was for the circulation to go up. But Vernon kept a neutral expression, for he knew that George was working his way around to the photographs.

Vernon tried to speed him up. “We’ve got a good story on Friday about a pair of Siamese twins in local government…”

“Pah!”

It worked. George was suddenly on his feet.

“That’s not a story, Vernon. That’s tittle-tattle. I’ll show you a story. I’ll show you why Julian Garmony is running round the Inns of Court with his thumb up his arse! Come with me.”

They went back down the hall, past the kitchen, and along a narrower corridor that ended in a door, which George opened with a Yale key. Part of the complicated arrangement of his marriage had been that Molly kept herself, her guests, and her stuff separate in a wing of the house. She was spared the sight of her old friends stifling their amusement at George’s pomposity, and he escaped the tidal waves of Molly’s disorder engulfing the rooms of the house used for entertaining. Vernon had visited Molly’s apartment many times, but he had always used the external entrance. Now, as George pushed the door open, Vernon tensed. He felt unprepared. He would have preferred to look at the photographs in George’s part of the house.

In the semidarkness, during the seconds it took George to fumble for the light switch, Vernon experienced for the first time the proper impact of Molly’s death—the plain fact of her absence. The recognition was brought on by familiar smells that he had already started to forget—her perfume, her cigarettes, the dried flowers she kept in the bedroom, coffee beans, the bakery warmth of laundered clothes. He had talked about her at length, and he had thought of her too, but only in snatches during his crowded working days, or while drifting into sleep, and until now he had never really missed her in his heart, or felt the insult of knowing he would never see or hear her again. She was his friend, perhaps the best he had ever had, and she had gone. He could easily have made a fool of himself in front of George, whose outline was blurring even now. This particular kind of desolation, a painful constriction right behind his face, above the roof of his mouth, he hadn’t known since childhood, since prep school. Homesick for Molly. He concealed a gasp of self-pity behind a loud adult cough.

The place was exactly as she had left it the day she finally consented to move to a bedroom in the main house, to be imprisoned and nursed by George. As they passed the bathroom, Vernon glimpsed a skirt of hers he remembered, draped over the towel rail, and a towel and a bra lying on the floor. Over a quarter of a century ago she and Vernon had made a household for almost a year, in a tiny rooftop flat on the rue de Seine. There were always damp towels on the floor then, and cataracts of her underwear tumbling from the drawers she never closed, a big ironing board that was never folded away, and in the one overfilled wardrobe dresses, crushed and shouldering sideways like commuters on the metro. Magazines, makeup, bank statements, bead necklaces, flowers, knickers, ashtrays, invitations, tampons, LPs, airplane tickets, high-heeled shoes—not a single surface was left uncovered by something of Molly’s, so that when Vernon was meant to be working at home, he took to writing in a cafe along the street. And yet each morning she arose fresh from the shell of this girly squalor, like a Botticelli Venus, to present herself, not naked, of course, but sleekly groomed, at the offices of Paris Vogue.

“In here” George said, and led the way into the living room. There was a large brown envelope on a chair. As George was reaching for it, Vernon had time to glance around. She could walk in at any moment. There was a book on Italian gardens lying face-down on the floor and, on a low table, three wineglasses, each with a lining of grayish green mold. Perhaps he himself had been drinking from one. He tried to remember his last visit here, but the occasions blurred. There were long conversations about her move to the main house, which she dreaded and resisted, knowing it would be a one-way journey. The alternative was a nursing home. Vernon and all her other friends advised her to stay in Holland Park, believing familiarity would serve her better. How wrong they had been. She would have been freer, even under the strictest institutional regime, than she turned out to be in George’s care.