'No . . .' Raymond nodded. 'Quite an interesting character. Died in the sixties. Businessman, art collector left some stuff to the V and A?' Rob shook his head obligingly. 'Lived up the road Harrow Weald. Big house called Mattocks, sort of Arts and Crafts. Never married,' said Raymond reasonably.

'I get the picture.'

'Lived with his sister, who died in the mid-seventies. After which Mattocks became an old people's home. Closed down a few years ago place boarded up, kids got in, a bit of vandalism, not too bad. Now about to be demolished.'

'I a.s.sume Hector's been over it . . . ?'

'There wasn't much left.'

'No, well, those old folks . . .'

Raymond grunted. 'Thieves got the best stained-gla.s.s windows. Hector salvaged a fireplace or two. But there was a strong-room no one had got into, which didn't hold Hector back for long. Nothing valuable in it, apparently, just papers and stuff from Hewitt's days.'

'Including what you have in your hand.'

Raymond pa.s.sed it over and as he did so the hinged bra.s.s bar of the lock dropped open. 'We had to cut it, I'm afraid.'

'Oh . . .' It seemed to Rob a bit rum that a man who could unlock a strong-room had to take a hacksaw to a book. A handsome book, too, the inner border of the binding tooled in gold, thick gold on the page-edges, the endpapers with gold-seamed crimson marbling, bound by Webster's, 'By Appointment to Queen Alexandra'. Rob winced at the violation, quite apart from the damage to the price. Inside perhaps a hundred pages densely written over in greyish blue-black ink, a sheet of mauve blotting-paper half-way through marking where the writing stopped.

'Have a look at it,' said Raymond. 'Cup of tea?'

And so he settled Rob down, after jarring shunting of a large wardrobe, in a tiny improvised sitting-room, made out of a chaise-longue, a bedside cupboard and a standard-lamp. The tea was served in a bone-china cup and saucer. Beyond the wardrobe, he could hear Raymond back at his computer, moments of music and talk.

At first, Rob wasn't sure what he was reading. 'December 27, 1911 My dear Harry I can never thank you enough for the Gramophone, or "Sheraton Upright Grand" to give it its official t.i.tle! It is the most splendid gift anyone ever had, Harry old boy. You should have seen my sister's face when the lid was first opened it was a Study, Harry. My mother says it is quite unearthly to have Mr McCormack singing his heart out in her own humble Drawing room! You must come and hear him yourself soon Harry. Mere Thanks are inadequate Harry old boy Best love from Yours ever Hubert.' The handwriting was small, vigorous and compacted. Under a ruled line another letter began immediately: 'January 11, 1912 My dear old Harry A Thousand thanks for the Books. The binding alone is most handsome and Sheridan one of the best writers I am sure. My mother says we must read the plays out Harry she is keen for you to take a Part! Daphne is all set to dress up too! You know I am not much of an actor Harry old boy. We will see you tomorrow at 7.30. Really you are too kind to us all. Tons of love from yours Hubert.'

So, a letter-book, copies kept by the grateful 'Hubert'? It seemed a bit unlikely he would show such pride in them. In which case, letters transcribed by their recipient, also 'H' of course, to immortalize them, if that was the word? So many of them were thank-you letters that it seemed little more than a vanity project. He had an image of this wealthy old queen in effect writing thank-you letters to himself (' "My dear Harry," wrote Harry.'). Rob skimmed on, with lowish expectations, eye out for proper nouns . . . Harrow, Mattocks, Stanmore, the whole thing parochial in the extreme, and then Hamburg, 'when you get back from Germany, Harry,' well, we knew Harry was a businessman. Rob sipped frowningly at his tea. It was slightly chilly in the shop. 'You will not find me much use at bridge, Harry, Old maid is about my level!'

Jumping ahead, Rob started to see there was something else going on, a kind of shadow side to the glow of grat.i.tude. June 4, 1913 'My dear old Harry, I am very sorry but you know by now I am not the demonstrative type, it is not in my nature Harry.' September 14, 1913 'Harry, you must not think me ungrateful, no one ever had a better friend, however I'm afraid I do rather shun, and Dislike, displays of physical affection between men. It is not in my way Harry.' In fact of course the two strands often came together, thanks and no thanks. Perhaps the book of vanity was also a covert record of mortification or success: Rob didn't know how it was going to end. He tried to picture the displays of physical affection what were they? More than hugs, kisses, perhaps, begun with tense negligence, then growing more insistent and difficult. And meanwhile the presents escalated. May 1913, 'The gun arrived this morning it's an absolute ripper, Harry old boy'; October 1913, 'Harry, I can't thank you enough for the truly splendid wardrobe. My poor old suits look quite shabby in their new home!' and a quaint reflection, 'Creature comforts in life do matter Harry, whatever the Divines may say!' Then January 1914, 'My dear old Harry, the little car is a joy I went out with Daphne for a spin in her we did 48mph several times! She says a Straker is the best car in the world, and I am bound to agree. Only a large Wolseley overhauled us.' Was there a certain hardening, the half-hidden note of covetousness, poor puzzled Hubert very slightly corrupted by all this generosity? Perhaps Harry would give him a Wolseley next. To an ardent gay man the recurrent olds that tolled through the letters 'My dear old Harry', 'Harry old boy' however cheerfully meant, might have palled after a bit: 'I cannot believe you are 37 tomorrow, Harry old boy!' in November 1912. Well, it was a curiosity clever of Raymond to see that, and worth paying a bit for. One of Garsaint's customers would probably go for it, the collectors of Gay Lives, which Rob had made a speciality of. And then of course the date.

He leafed forward, something resistant in the dense exclamatory crawl of the writing, the words themselves. There was very little after the end of 1914 a few short letters from France, it seemed: BEF Rouen, more whole-hearted letters now they were apart, perhaps, and the whole perspective had changed. Then a letter of April 5, 1917: 'My dear old Harry A quick letter as we are moving shortly but don't know where. They don't give us much notice as a rule. A glorious day, which makes life feel much more worth living. We had our Easter service today, as we shall probably be moved by then, and I stayed to Communion afterwards. You will keep an eye on Hazel won't you Harry old boy she is a dear sweet girl and on Mother and Daphne too. Goodnight Harry and best love from Hubert.' After which Harry had written, 'My last letter from my darling boy: FINIS.' But underneath, in a ruled ink box, there was a little memorial: HUBERT OWEN SAWLE.

1st Lieut 'The Blues'

Born Stanmore, Mddx, January 15, 1891 Killed at Ivry April 8, 1917 Aged Twenty-Six At the counter Raymond raked his beard, 'Ah, Rob any interest?'

'This Hubert Sawle any relation of G. F. Sawle and Madeleine Sawle?'

'Very good, Rob . . . yes . . . Hubert was G. F.'s brother.'

'Totally unheard-of.'

'Till now . . .' Raymond nodded at the book.

'And Daphne Sawle was the sister. You see, I met this woman last week who was Daphne Sawle's grand-daughter.'

'Right . . .'

'I got a bit lost in her story, about the biography of Cecil Valance, you know. She said her grandmother had written her memoirs. I meant to chase it up.'

'I don't know,' said Raymond; and as this was something he didn't like saying, he got to work.

'Of course the house in "Two Acres" was round here, wasn't it?'

'Stanmore, yep.'

'Anything there?'

Raymond peered, scrolled down and up, tongue on lip. 'Demolished five or six years ago well, it was a ruin already. No, Rob, there's no one called Sawle except G. F. and Madeleine, who I happen to know was his wife.'

'Are you on Abe?'

'G. F. edited Valance's letters, of course.'

'That's right,' said Rob, again with the private glow of perceived connections, the protective feeling for his quarry that came up in any extended search. 'I've an idea Daphne wrote under the name Jacobs.'

'Oh yes . . .' Raymond's large hands made their darting wobble above the keyboard.

'She's totally forgotten now, but she published this book of memoirs about thirty years ago she was married to Dudley Valance, then to an artist called Revel Ralph.'

'Right . . . here we are . . . Daphne Jacobs: a.s.syrian Woodwind Instruments that the one?'

'Um . . .'

'Bronze Ornaments of Ancient Mesopotamia.'

'I don't think she goes back quite that far.'

'Corpus Mesopotamianum . . .' that slowed him up for a second. 'There's loads of this stuff.'

'I think her book's called The Short Gallery.'

'O-kay here we go The Short Gallery: Portraits from Life. Aha, seven copies . . . Plymbridge Press, 1979, 212 pp . . . First Edition, 1. There you are!'

Rob came round and looked over Raymond's shoulder. 'Scroll down a bit.' There were the usual anomalies fine copy in fine dj, 2.50; ex-library, with no dj, damp-staining to rear boards, some light underlining, 18, with an excitable sales pitch, 'Contains candid portraits of leading writers and artists A Huxley, Mary Gibbons, Lord Berners, Revd Ralph &c sensational account of teenage affair with WW1 Poet Dudley Valance.'

'Wrong!' said Raymond. 'Right?'

'Love Revd Ralph,' said Rob. 'Now that's amusing. "Inscribed by the author 'To Paul Bryant, April 18, 1980'." ' With it was the sixteen-page catalogue, which Garsaint sometimes had, for the Revel Ralph 'Scenes and Portraits' exhibition at the Michael Parkin Gallery in 1984, with a posthumous foreword by Daphne Jacobs rea.s.suringly unsigned: 25.

The final copy, from Delirium Books in LA, floated aloft in a bookman's empyrean of its own: 'Sir Dudley Valance's copy, with his bookplate designed by St John Hall, inscribed and signed by the author "To Dudley from Duffel", with numerous comments and corrections in pencil and ink by Dudley Valance. Book condition: fair. Dust-jacket, losses to head of spine, 1cm repaired tear to rear panel. In protective red morocco slipcase. An exceptional a.s.sociation copy. $1,500.'

'Take your pick,' said Raymond.

'Mm, I will,' said Rob. Jennifer Ralph's description of the book as 'rather feeble' tugged against his more indulgent curiosity. Of course she would have known some of the figures whose portraits appeared in it, which made a difference. 'And how much do you want for Hewitt?'

'Hundred?'

Rob raised an eyebrow. 'Raymond?'

'You saw the Valance letters?'

'I'm sorry . . . ?' Rob raised an eyebrow too, coloured slightly.

'Oh, yes.' And taking the book back from him, Raymond showed him that a few blank pages further on from the mid-volume FINIS there was another small section of transcribed letters, very different in tone. 'That's really the interest, Robson, my friend.'

'Dear Hewitt,' the first one began, in September 1913; modulating to 'Dear Harry' in the third letter, sent from France. Five letters in total, the last dated June 27, 1916, signed, 'Yours ever, Cecil'.

'Have these been published, I wonder?'

'You'd have to check.'

'I bet they haven't.' Rob looked over them as quickly as the writing allowed. The idea that Valance might have had a thing with Hewitt too . . . No sign of it, which was itself somehow suggestive. 'And why did the old fool transcribe them I mean, what did he do with the originals?'

'Ah, you see, he failed to think of the needs of a twenty-first-century bookseller quite a common failing of the past.'

'Thanks for that.' Rob looked at the last letter more narrowly.

It was bad luck you couldn't get to up to Stokes's you would like him, I think. It occurred to me to send you the new poems before we get stuck in to the next big show I will send them tomorrow, all being well, when I have gone over them once more. They are for your eyes only you will see they are not publishable in my life-time or England's! Stokes has seen some (not all). One of them draws, you will see, on our last meeting. Let me know you have them safe. My love (is that too fresh?) to Elspeth the strict scholar.

Yours ever, Cecil.

'So the house has been completely cleared, has it?'

'They're getting out the last stuff this week.'

'Mm, what sort of stuff?' Rob thought he saw the colour creep up behind Raymond's beard as he turned away and rummaged on the desk a distraction, though at first Rob thought it was a search for some further evidence.

'I haven't been down there myself. I think Debbie's there now.'

'Well, why didn't you say so before?' to Rob the slow afternoon, the mild trance of autumn in North London, the musty otherworld of Chadwick's shop, were revealed as a decoy, a disastrous waste of time, like the stifling obstacles and digressions of a certain kind of dream. 'How far is it to the house?'

'Well, how are you going?'

There was a taxi-rank down the road towards the school, as if ready to whisk the boys off to their homes, or the shops, or the airport . . . Rob ran down to the first car, but there was no driver: he was over the road, at the cafe, picking up a tea and a sandwich, and it was more than the driver of the second cab's life was worth to take his fare . . . the cabbies' tedious etiquette. Rob sensed there was something offputting in his own urgency, a hint of unwelcome trouble he went grinning impatiently to the cafe, and after a minute the driver followed him out to the taxi. 'It's a house called Mattocks was an old people's home. Do you know it?'

'Well, I did know it,' said the cabbie, slow in the pleasure of his own irony. 'There's not much going on down there now.'

'No, I know.'

'They'll have the wreckers' b.a.l.l.s down there, any day now.' And he looked at Rob in the mirror as he slid into his seat, doubtless toying with some dismal joke.

'Let's see if we can get there first,' said Rob. He leant coaxingly forward and saw his own eyes and nose in the mirror, in surreal isolation.

They turned and headed out north again, up through the most densely congested junctions of Harrow-on-the-Hill, the driver's courtesy extending to any number of undecided road-crossers, reversing delivery-vans and anxious would-be joiners from side-roads; he was a great letter-in. Then in the leafy residential streets and avenues of the Weald his vaguely smiling dawdle on the brink of third gear suggested almost that he didn't know where he was going. He started joking about something Rob seemed to have missed, Rob said 'Sorry?' and then saw he was talking on his phone, deploring something with a friend, laughing, the loud unguarded half of a conversation in which Rob's needs seemed to shrink even further, the mere transient ticking of the fare. Above the pavements the tall horse-chestnuts were dropping their leaves, the oaks just beginning to rust and wither. So many of the big old houses had come down, their long gardens built over. There was a low wall with a sloped coping, the railings gone, a broken and leaning board fence behind. 'Just a minute, Andy,' said the driver, and set Rob down with a pleasant nod as he gave the change, a faint retroactive suggestion they'd had a nice time together.

Rob picked his way past the black puddles in the ruts of the drive. The house was set fifty yards back from the road, though its privacy had long been surrendered on either side new developments looked in over the boundary walls. It was one of those big red-brick villas, of the 1880s perhaps, with gables and a turret, a lot of timber and tile-hanging, and very high ground-floor rooms that would take a fortune to furnish and heat, and so easily (Rob had seen them all over London) turned bleak and barely habitable in their latter-day lives. Now there were holes in the steep slate roof, small bushes seeded in the gutters, stripes of moss and slime down the walls. A JCB was backed up under the trees, and beside it a blue Focus presumably belonging to Debbie.

The front door was boarded up, and Rob made his way round to the side. There was a smell of smoke, cutting and toxic, not the good autumn-leaf smell. The ground sloped down, so that the broken veranda along the side of the house rose up to shoulder height. Then there was the round turret, and then a high brick wall with a door on to a tiny yard, the service entrance, the door here wide open Rob slipped into the house through a dark scullery with huge tin sinks, a dim kitchen with a gas range, broken chairs, nothing worth salvaging. The floor was gritty underfoot, and there was a penetrating smell of raw damp then he pushed open a fire-door into what must have been the dining-room and there was the smell of smoke again. He saw the awful wiring and boxing-in the old house had been too disfigured thirty years before for any real sense of marvelment or discovery. He wrote it off. Into the hall fire-doors again concealing the stairs, but light through double doors on to a room on the garden side of the house. He heard a child's voice, the carefree note with its little edge of determination.

'Are you Debbie?' Out on the lawn, a shrubby tangle trampled back, a red-faced woman in jeans and a T-shirt was picking up items around the smouldering bonfire and throwing them on top some old magazines caught, doubtfully, a moment of flame curling outwards as they slithered back down.

'Don't get too close, now' a boy of six or seven, red-faced too in his small anorak, bringing random things forward, a cardboard box, a handful of gra.s.s and twigs that fell back over his feet as he tossed it.

Debbie didn't know who Rob was: he saw the curbing of curiosity, her provisional stance of responsibility for what was going on. 'Raymond sent me down, I'm Rob.'

'Oh, yes, right,' said Debbie. 'I was just about to call him, we're nearly done.'

Rob looked into the fire, which seemed dense and half-digested, colour still showing in old floor-mats, were they? that the fire had given up on, pink edges of a blackened curtain. 'How long's it been burning?'

'What was it, Jack, day before yesterday?'

But the boy ran off at this to find something else to burn. Rob disguised his anxiety, picked up a stick and flipped some loose bits of wood back into the pyre. He had the almost absurd idea that other items might still be lying unconsumed at the bottom of it all; he saw them raking it out with a sense of excitement and purpose greater than that of the burning already it seemed a story. 'Raymond said you'd cleared the strong-room?'

Debbie had a wary eye out for the child. 'Yes, that can go on, my love.' Though little Jack had his own caprices and changes of mind.

'I'm saving this one, Mummy.'

'Well, all right . . .' Debbie said, with a glance at Rob, the mime of patience. 'Sorry . . . yes' he saw she was neither for him nor against him. 'We got all that out on Monday it was just old papers, account books.' She snubbed her nose as she nodded. 'Rubbish, no use to anyone.'

Rob looked round at the house rearing behind them, the curved flight of broken stone steps he had come down into the garden; and down which Harry Hewitt must have come a thousand times, and his beloved Hubert, now and then perhaps, before the Great War, having motored over in the Straker with his sister Daphne for protection.

'Mind if I have a look round?'

'Help yourself. Electric's off, though you won't see much.' She told him where the strong-room was, beyond the TV room, was it? well, all the functions were muddled up. He wondered if he really wanted to go in.

'Mum? Mum?' Jack holding a wicker basket aloft in both hands.

'No, that can go on G.o.d, it's Victorian, some of this stuff!' with a first look of humorous collusion with Rob. Jack had his own pile of salvage, items he was pointedly saving from the flames, and another pile of things to be gleefully thrown on. Sometimes an item was moved from one pile to the other with the proper arbitrariness of fate.

Back through the french doors into the sitting-room with a shadowy hole in the wall: a fireplace Hector had rescued, perhaps. Through the door on the left into the TV room, lit up as if underwater by a small bramble-covered window; and beyond this a short pa.s.sage, almost dark, with a white-painted door on the right standing open to reveal the black steel door of the strong-room immediately behind it, also just ajar. Rob's curiosity was as much about the secret room as its contents, when he gripped the handle. He supposed a collector needed such a place, perhaps Hewitt was a h.o.a.rder who took more pleasure in possession than display. Well, it had kept one secret pretty closely, for ninety years. He wondered when he'd copied the letters out as they arrived, or when he was grieving, or much later, in a painful search for lost feelings? With a wary murmur Rob slid his foot forward over the threshold, breathed the smell, unlike the rest of the place, dry wood. Then he thought of his phone, snapped it open and shone its faint spy's light in front of him. The s.p.a.ce was only an arm's reach deep, slatted wooden shelves on three sides, like an airing-cupboard. A stone floor, a bulb hanging above. The phone's light dimmed unwastefully and went out: he lit it again, ran it quickly round. Debbie had left nothing, except something whiteish on the floor, under the shelf on the left, a piece of newspaper. Rob picked it up, a sheet of the Daily Telegraph, and uncrumpled it: November 6, 1948. When the light went again, he stood for a moment, daring himself, in the near dark, testing the emptiness and the quickly stifled echo; then he got out. And puzzling vaguely over it as he came back into the relative brightness of the sitting-room, he realized from the stiffened folds that the page of the Telegraph had been used to wrap some square object, it was a wholly random survival, of no interest in itself. He took it out to throw on to the fire.

There was now quite a show, some broken chairs had been tossed on and the whole thing had a wild dangerous heat and snap to it, loud cracks and sparks, a roll of black smoke from a foam-rubber cushion. Little Jack was awed, standing back beside his mother, but with a look of calculation about dares of his own. They seemed to stretch ahead.

'Find anything?' said Debbie. Of course it was a sign of her excellence that he hadn't. It occurred to him, as he went back down the drive and on to the unknown street, that Valance had never sent the promised letter, on the eve of the Somme, after all if he had done, the careful memorious Hewitt would surely have transcribed it too. And now Rob had to get back into Town he had a date at seven with . . . for a moment he couldn't think of his name. He looked on his phone for the text, and caught the smell of smoke on his hands.

ALSO BY ALAN HOLLINGHURST.

The Swimming-Pool Library.

The Folding Star.

The Spell.

The Line of Beauty.