He began to prepare himself to go out. He always found it difficult to leave his room, and tonight was going to be important. He wanted Mr. and Mrs. Palmer-Jones to like him. He was just pulling a clean sweater over his head when he heard the noise of the front door. His father was home.

He knew that his father had tried to get closer to him since Tom had died. The new attempt at friendship disturbed him. It was too late. Still angry at the memory of his father’s rudeness to Tom, he did not know how to respond to the clumsy gestures of sympathy. It confused Adam. It was easier to hate his father. Yet the habit of detached and insincere politeness remained and helped him to survive. Since early childhood, after scenes and tantrums had been punished or ignored, Adam had found cold politeness to be his most effective weapon. It gave nothing away. It gave his father no excuse to seek contact.

“Adam,” his father shouted up the stairs. “Adam, are you at home?”

Adam looked in the mirror, composed himself and opened the bedroom door.

“Yes, Father,” he said flatly. “I’m here.”

His father was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs, his round face, tilted upwards, was strangely unfamiliar. His lack of height, his attitude as he waited for his son, made him almost human.

“Are you going out?” Clive Anderson asked. He tried to sound interested, but he had asked the question so many times before, with disapproval, as Adam set out with rucksack and binoculars, that it was almost ritual.

“Yes, Father. Mr. and Mrs. Palmer-Jones have invited me to supper.”

Forgetting his rule not to give away more information than was necessary, he added: “ They want to see my notes on a bird I found in Norfolk.”

“Ah, I see.”

Adam knew suddenly that his father was jealous of George Palmer-Jones, jealous of the confidence that his son placed in him. Adam wanted to say to his father. “Can I show them to you? Would you like to see them?” He wanted to say: “ I think I’m in trouble. I may need your help. Please help me,” but that would have been weakness and his father would have despised him.

Mr. Anderson approached his son cautiously, placed a hand on his shoulder.

“Well, have a good time.”

Adam shrank away from the touch. He said, very politely: “Thank you, Father.”

Clive Anderson, an old man, watched the boy go, and the hatred of Tom French returned, hatred of the man who had turned Adam against him, of the man who had corrupted his son.

Molly Palmer-Jones had to remind her husband that Adam had been invited to supper. He was preoccupied with the details, the mechanics of Tom’s death. He sat at the kitchen table, as she prepared the meal, and he wrote innumerable lists, and a chart that was a precise timetable of events. She disliked cooking in front of him. She was a good cook, but clumsy, perhaps a little unhygienic, and he was critical of her untidiness. Finally, exasperated by his concentration and the tiny, precise writing which she could not read from the end of the table where she stood rolling pastry, she sent him to the garden to cut a lettuce for the salad.