David walked us to the van where Marcus rummaged until he found a pen so we could write down our numbers. When it was my turn, I hesitated.

“You can try this if you can’t get anyone else.”

“It’s for the box. Andy doesn’t have a phone. You have to call the phone box at the end of her road and sometimes she answers and sometimes no one answers, and sometimes you get a passerby,” Em said.

David folded the note and put it in his pocket. “Although if this is the last day ever, I guess there isn’t much time for me to use it.” While he was not looking at me in particular, in fact was turning from me to pat Peter on the shoulder and tell him that he must come back and try out the piano, I thought I felt the slightest stillness among his words, like the spot in a stream where the blank surface hides unexpected depths. And then, as we piled into the van, he glanced my way, as though to see if I had noticed it.

On the way back, we were quiet. I turned round in the passenger seat. Em was flicking through her sketchbook, but Peter’s eyes were closed, his arms wrapped around his knees. I figured that he was hating himself for his performance back at the manor. I had a way of bringing him out of it when he got like that; the trick was to make him focus his disgust on something outside himself. Shit music. Shit telly. Shittest album, actor, newsreader, DJ, politician. Biggest prick at school among the sixth form, biggest prick among the staff. Get the venom going, get the fangs bared and pointing outward.

But this time, I turned back to look at the road and left him to stew in it. It was not just that Peter was leaving, it was that he was so desperate to be gone; to embark on a new life at Oxford among his future friends, a cast he’d assembled from the pages of books by Evelyn Waugh, and men he referred to initially by surname—Wilde, Huxley, Auden—and then, as though they had, over crumpets and tea in their rooms, moved on to first-name terms, as Oscar, Aldous, and Wystan.

“You’ll come back to see us, won’t you?” I’d asked.

“I expect we’ll motor back for the odd weekend.”

Because that is what Oxford promised, weekends of motoring in the countryside, picnics under trees with companions who would, after the wine had gone to their head, rest their cheek upon his arm, sigh and close their lovely eyes. It was his grail and I had no role to play in it.