"And then there's shame," James continued. "Shame is signified by the placing of the fingers over the eyes. Comme ca."

Caroline was not surprised by the representation of shame; it might have been a Renaissance gesture, but it was also the gesture of those convicted of contemporary crimes, those unfortunates led from the court who shielded their eyes with their fingers in exactly the same way. Schadenfreude, she remembered; we love the shame of others nothing makes the mob happier than the sight of somebody humiliated. She had read an article somewhere about its effects: how we enjoyed our feeling of moral superiority; how readily we exploded into moral outrage over the misdeeds of public people caught out. And all the time we ignored or were unaware of the glaring fact that such people were the way they were because we were the way we were. A rotten society produces rotten public figures.

As their train rattled on to its destination, James continued with his observations on the language of gesture. "Of course there are all sorts of sign language," he went on. "Auctioneers, merchants, bookies. Have you seen tic-tac being used?"

Caroline had not.

James smiled. "It's the sign language used by bookies," he said. "They signal across the track. They show the odds that way." He paused, and then reached up and put a hand on either side of his nose. "That's odds of five to two," he explained.

Caroline raised an eyebrow. "Why don't they use mobile phones?"

James sighed. "They do these days," he said. "It's so sad. It's another language that's biting the dust. But at least there are the monks."

"The monks?"

"Monastic sign language," said James. "People like Cistercians, who discourage unnecessary talking. Do you know that they have an elaborate system of communicating without speech?"

"Why?" It struck Caroline as odd that one would eschew one form of communication only to resort to another: what did it matter how one communicated if the end result was the same the message was conveyed?

James shrugged. "It's to do with rejecting the noise and distraction of the world," he said. "I think they've got a point. There's so much noise, Caroline." He gave her an intense look as he uttered the word noise, as if to suggest, she thought, that she was the source of more than her fair share of this din.

If James had intended to blame Caroline for the shattering of the peace, he did not pursue the accusation. There was more to be said, it transpired, on monastic sign language.

"I once saw a whole book on the subject," he said. "It had pictures of monks making gestures with their hands. So, do you know how to do soul?" He paused, but only momentarily; of course Caroline could not be expected to know something like that, it was monks' business. "You put your hand above your head like this and then you look upwards."

"I think it's ridiculous," said Caroline. "It's all male silliness like those ridiculous signs that Masons have. The handshakes and so on."

James narrowed his eyes. "How do you know about that?" he asked.

Caroline glanced across the carriage as she prepared to answer. A man seated opposite her a man wearing a pinstripe suit was staring at her with interest, as if awaiting her answer. Suddenly she felt inhibited.

The man leaned forward. One did not talk to strangers in such circ.u.mstances, but he seemed indifferent to this; she sensed danger. "Nothing ridiculous about the Masons," he said, his voice barely raised above the clatter of the train. "You should remember that, my dear!"

Chapter 8: Tibetan Hats.

They emerged into the light through the Charing Cross Road exit of Leicester Square Station.

"Obviously a Mason," said James. "Spooky."

"They've got that big hall near here," said Caroline. "Freemasons' Hall. Great Queen Street. Perhaps he was on his way there."

James smiled. "For a ceremony of some sort, do you think?"

Caroline was not sure. "Should we have asked him?"

James did not think this a good idea. "You can't ask members of a secret society what they're up to," he said. "It spoils their fun. And it's rude, too. It's like laughing at Black Rod or the Garter King of Arms when they're all dressed up for one of those occasions of theirs."

They made their way round the corner into Cecil Court. This was a shopping expedition of the curious variety that James and Caroline enjoyed undertaking in each other's company an expedition in search of something small and obscure. They never shopped together for the functional or the necessary, for sweaters or shoes or the like; it was hardly any fun going with somebody into a shop on Oxford Street or Regent Street. In fact, nor was it any fun going into such a shop without somebody.

James had to collect something from a book-dealer in Cecil Court, an out-of-print monograph on the sense of imminent event in the works of Nicolas Poussin not something one could readily buy on Oxford Street, given its lamentable decline. For her part, Caroline planned to pick up a Tibetan wool hat from a stall in Covent Garden Market. She had seen the hat a few weeks earlier and had vacillated, a fatal thing to do when confronted with shopping temptation. Since then, she had regretted her failure to make the purchase.

"Fifteen pounds," she said to James. "That's all it was. I should have bought it."

"Fifteen pounds is not much for a hat these days. Tibetan, you say?"

"In concept," said Caroline. "I think they're actually made in Bermondsey."

"By Tibetans?"

Caroline did not think so. "The woman who sells them was knitting one when I was at her stall. She was Irish, I think. Or she certainly sounded it."

"She might have had a bit of Tibetan in her," said James. "One never knows, and perhaps one should give the benefit of the doubt in such a case."

"Does it matter?"

James shook his head. "Of course not. Hats don't have to come from where they claim. Look at panamas. They come from Ecuador." He slowed down to peer into the window of a secondhand bookshop. "You know, I saw the Dalai Lama once."

Caroline was interested. "Where?"

"Outside Foyles," replied James. "He had been signing copies of a book he wrote. And he came out of the shop as I was walking along the pavement. He had some people with him who sort of ushered him into a car, and off they went up towards Tottenham Court Road. Floated off, really. It was very ..." he seemed to be searching for the right word. "It was very spiritual."

"How strange. In the middle of London, with all the traffic and so on."

James agreed. "Exactly. What struck me was the sense of peace that he radiated it was a sort of glow. You know how some people glow."

"No."

"Well, they do. They glow because they're full of inner peace and resolution." He turned away from the bookshop window and looked directly at Caroline. "Most of us don't really know what we want in this life, do we? We spend our time rushing around from here to there, and then back again. We have a very strong sense of forward motion. The Dalai Lama wasn't like that or at least he wasn't when I saw him in Charing Cross Road."

They continued to walk down Cecil Court. "You know that they find him?" said James.

"Who?"

"The Dalai Lama," he said. "They find a new Dalai Lama as a child. He's the reincarnation, you see, of the last one. They look for signs." He paused. "We could do that with the Archbishop of Canterbury, don't you think? We could find the reincarnated Archbishop of Canterbury as a small boy and bring him up in his new role."

Caroline laughed. "He'd have a terrible time at school," she said. "Imagine how he'd be teased by the other kids. And it would be difficult for the teachers too. 'Stop talking and get on with your work, please, Archbishop of Canterbury.' It wouldn't be easy."

"They'd call him Your Grace," said James. "That's what you call the Archbishop of Canterbury. Teachers would know that sort of thing." He paused for a moment. "Or maybe not ..."

They reached a small bookshop with a display of modern first editions in the window. "This is the place," James said. "Tindley and Chapman. It's a great place. They've got all sorts of stuff."

They went in. Mr Tindley was at his desk, paging through a book. He looked up and smiled at them. "Poussin?"

"Yes," said James.

Mr Tindley half-turned and extracted a small pamphlet from the shelf behind him. "It's in quite good condition," he said, handing the pamphlet to James.

James looked at the price. "Seventeen pounds?"

Mr Tindley nodded. "It's quite rare."

James reached into his pocket and extracted a twenty pound note. Mr Tindley took the note and gave the change. They went out.

Caroline noticed that after he had slipped the pamphlet into a pocket, James put the three pound coins into his wallet. Then he reached into another pocket and took out the bottle of sterilising gel.

"Money's really dirty," he said as they began to cross St Martin's Lane.

She watched as he poured a small quant.i.ty of gel onto the palm of his right hand.

"Dirty in what sense?" she asked. "Corrupting? Or because it represents exploitation of others?"

James looked at her in surprise. "Of course not," he said. "Nothing political. I meant because it's often covered in germs. It's handled by so many people, you see."

Caroline said nothing for a few moments, but once they were safely across the street she turned to James and touched him lightly on the forearm. "Listen, James," she said. "Aren't you being just a little bit too fussy about germs? I mean, there are germs all over the place. We're covered in them."

James gave a shudder. "Speak for yourself," he said.

Chapter 9: The Use of the Subjunctive.

While Caroline and James made their way to Covent Garden Market, not far away, in their offices in a discreet square in the heart of Soho, the Ragg Porter Literary Agency was about to have its quarterly review meeting. There were three princ.i.p.als in the firm, two of whom, Barbara Ragg and Rupert Porter, had taken over the business from their respective fathers. Gregory Ragg and Fatty Porter had collaborated amicably for over thirty years, and had blithely a.s.sumed that their offspring would do the same. The hope that Barbara and Rupert would work together was not misplaced, but that their relationship should mirror that of their fathers proved to be a wish too far; for although they made a success of the agency, Barbara and Rupert would never have described each other as friends.

The main reason for the coolness between them was an historical one rather than any fundamental incompatibility of temperament. And like the old enmity between Ecuador and Peru, or between Chile and Argentina, the ill-feeling between Barbara and Rupert was based on a territorial dispute. In the case of Ecuador and Peru, the argument had been about ownership of part of the Amazonian Basin; in the case of Barbara and Rupert, the casus belli was the ownership of the Notting Hill flat Fatty Porter had sold years ago to Gregory Ragg. According to Rupert, this sale had only gone through because Fatty believed that Gregory wanted the flat for himself; but in the end, after living there for only a year or so, Gregory had retired to the country and pa.s.sed the flat to his daughter. Had Fatty known that this would happen, Rupert maintained, he would never have sold the flat in the first place, and he Rupert would now be comfortably ensconced in it. As it was, Barbara now lived in it and enjoyed the advantages of its substantial drawing room, which was very much larger than that which Rupert and his wife had in their own, markedly inferior flat.

The disagreement between Ecuador and Peru had resulted in a state of armed tension between the two countries. Every so often, in the war season, as it became known, when the weather allowed for good flying, this would flare up into an exchange of actual hostilities, during which the Ecuadorians would shoot down a few Peruvian MIG fighters, and vice versa. Eventually better sense prevailed and the issue was resolved by the World Court largely in favour of Peru, a decision that did not meet with wide support in Ecuador. (It is still possible to engage the taxi drivers of Quito in discussion of this matter, making the Ecuadorian capital one of the few cities in the world where taxi drivers are prepared to discuss the jurisprudence of the World Court. London taxi drivers, although opinionated in some areas, are not known for the strength of their views on the decisions of the Hague court.) There had never been open hostilities between Barbara and Rupert, who restricted themselves to the occasional slightly needling remark just enough to keep the matter alive but not sufficient to lead to actual conflict. There was one such exchange that morning, as Rupert came into the meeting room at the Ragg Porter Agency to find Barbara flicking through an unsolicited ma.n.u.script, a look of amus.e.m.e.nt on her face.

"I see you're enjoying that," Rupert observed. "I took a ma.n.u.script home last night and left it there, I'm afraid. There's so much clutter in my study in the flat, you see not quite enough room. The ma.n.u.script disappeared under a pile of papers."

Barbara picked up the inference immediately. What Rupert was saying here was that her flat to which he did not think her ent.i.tled was much roomier; had he lived in the flat to which he was morally ent.i.tled (hers) he would not mislay ma.n.u.scripts.

So she looked up and replied: "You really should think about moving some time, Rupert. I hear that this is quite a good time to buy. There are quite a few for sale signs in our street, you know. Not that I would ever think of moving myself."

Rupert, of course, understood perfectly what this meant, which was: You should forget the past and stop moaning about things that happened a long time ago. You should find a larger flat because I'm never going to move out of the flat that you think is yours, so just forget it and shut up. So there.

Rupert pursed his lips. The subject would not be discussed further now, and possibly not again that entire week, but it would not be dropped. Oh no. When one was as certain of the rect.i.tude of one's cause as he was it would take more than a cheap salvo about moving and for sale signs to take the subject off the agenda altogether. But for now there was business to be done.

He sat down. The directors usually spent half an hour or so talking about agency affairs before the firm's three other agents, who were not on the board, joined the meeting. This gave them an opportunity to catch up on who was doing what, and also to exchange odd bits of publishing gossip that might be useful in negotiations on their clients' behalf.

"Your man, Great ... What's his name again?" said Rupert.

"Greatorex. Errol Greatorex."

"Yes, him. Where are we? Has he delivered the final ma.n.u.script yet?"

Barbara tossed aside the ma.n.u.script she had been reading. It would never do. "Unpublishable," she said, and added quickly, "This one, not Greatorex's. This is by a man who set out to sail from Southampton to Istanbul in a small yacht barely the size of a bathtub."

Rupert smiled. "And?"

"It all went terribly well, as far as I can make out. There were no storms, no incidents with larger vessels, and the Turks were terribly good to him when he arrived. It makes for dull literature when the Turks are kind to one. We can't have books like that."

"But what about Greatorex?"

Barbara sighed. "He's in London at the moment," she said. "He says that he's still putting the finishing touches to the ma.n.u.script. He promised me that it would be ready soon, but I'm having great difficulty in getting it out of him."

Rupert sighed. There had been a lot of talk hype even about the launch of Errol Greatorex's Autobiography of a Yeti, a story dictated to the author by a yeti who worked as a schoolteacher in a remote Himalayan village. But they had been waiting for some time now, and he was beginning to wonder whether the author would ever deliver.

"Are you sure that he's genuine?" Rupert asked. 'The whole thing seems a little bit .... How should I put it? Dubious."

"Oh, I think he's the real thing," Barbara a.s.sured him. "I had lunch with him the other day, when he came back from Tibet. He gave me a lovely Tibetan knitted hat. He picked it up in Lhasa."

"Generous of him," said Rupert. "It's nice when you meet an author who isn't selfish rare though it unfortunately be."

Barbara was impressed. "I love your subjunctives," she said.

And she was sincere in her praise. She did love a man who used the subjunctive mood, as Hugh had done that very morning when he kissed her goodbye at the door of the flat. "Were I to search for twenty years," he had said, "I would never find somebody as lovely as you."

It made her feel warm just to think of it. A beautiful subjunctive, as warm, as loving as a caress.

Chapter 10: How Dim Can You Get?.

It was not only Barbara Ragg's remark about the subjunctive that made Rupert wonder about her; there were other things he had noticed, little things, perhaps, but which taken together indicated that something was afoot. She was engaged, of course, and he asked himself whether the mere fact of engagement could make a person dreamy and distracted. He tried to remember what he had felt like when he had become engaged himself, but found it difficult even to recall when that was, and in what circ.u.mstances, let alone how he had felt at the time.

Of course Rupert knew that Barbara's private life was none of his business, and he would never have dreamed of prying, but if her state of mind was affecting her work, then that was a different matter altogether. And there had been signs of it. A few days previously, Barbara had written to an author and told him that not only had his ma.n.u.script been accepted for publication by a well-known publisher but that a sizeable advance had been negotiated. This must have been good news for the author in question, who had not been published before and whose work, although worthy, was on the very margins of what was commercially viable.

Her discovery two days later that she had written to the wrong author could hardly have been comfortable. The ma.n.u.script that had been offered for was by a quite different author one who was widely published already and would barely have noticed yet another publisher's advance.

"La Ragg," Rupert had said to his wife that evening, "made an absolutely colossal blunder. Colossal. She told somebody that his novel had been accepted for publication when it hadn't. She got the wrong author. Stupid cow."

Gloria Porter smiled. "How dim can you get?"

"Not much dimmer," said Rupert. "And you know what? The story gets better."