“I gave him books. Oscar Wilde. Auden. I didn’t want to invade his privacy. But I suppose that is an excuse too. I sometimes wish Jesus had endured the world just a bit longer. Thirty-three. It’s not a lot, is it, Andy?”

I made noises to go.

“You will come back and see us, won’t you? You won’t leave it so long?”

I promised. Before I went, he took my hand.

“You know, I cannot count the evenings we have sat here and talked about you and Peter, remembering your little ways. I would watch you, out there in the garden. I always thought God was in the games you played; they gave me faith, like when you watch the wind fill a sail and the boat leaps forward. Grace. It showed such grace.”

The last night together, we watched television. It felt an old-fashioned thing to be doing, sharing a single screen between three. I thought how one day people would look back on communal television watching with the same nostalgia they reserved for charades and playing cards.

The program was an ITV Sunday night special. There had been a murder. And it was the best kind of murder, a middle-class murder somewhere beautiful, neither gruesome nor graphic, with a pleasing array of suspects, and a detective who drank too much, but quietly, and had been wounded by life. In one of the breaks, Patricia made cocoa, missing the first minute of the next part, and never quite catching up again, so she asked questions at important moments and it was a great act of will not to shush her.

Nevertheless, we were gripped. Ten o’clock came and went without mention of bed. In the ad breaks, we discussed who we thought had done it, and which suspects were the red herrings, and the whole thing rose to a tense denouement, in which the detective had to race against time to prevent a further murder and was nearly offed himself.

“Look out!” we shouted at the crucial moment. The detective looked out, the murderer was apprehended, and in the final scene the detective shared some melancholy reflections on human nature with his partner, a bright-eyed sergeant.

We sat there spellbound till the final credits rolled, and then went to our beds consoled, and I lay there in the darkness, thinking how different the program was from life. How life was full of mysteries that would not be solved, not ever, while we lived. But that each of us would play the detective nonetheless, and the life and death we would investigate, whether we knew it or not, was our own. And the thing was not to become deadened to them, to the mysteries.

CHAPTER 24

THE CAVE OF DREAMS