‘I thought you said he didn’t do it.’

‘Everyone knew he’d done it. He only got off because the judge misdirected the jury. You can’t imagine how anyone would have the nerve to put up a sort of monument, can you, after a thing like that?’

Hugh started to run his bath. Resignedly, he accepted the fact, from past experience, that part of the evening would be spent in the company of Arnold Cottle. Cecily was not, and never had been, particularly flirtatious except in her own imagination. It was not that. Rather it was that she liked to get hold of causes or what she called examples of injustice or outrage and worry at them, roping in to assist her any helper who might be on hand. There had been the banning of the proposed motorway, the petition against the children’s playground, the eviction of the squatters down the road. She was not always reactionary, for she worshipped free speech and racial equality and health foods and clean air. She was a woman of principle who threw herself whole-heartedly into upheaval and change and battles that right might be done, and sometimes into cults for the improvement of her soul. The unfortunate part of all this, or one of the unfortunate parts, was that it brought her so often into the company of bores or rogues. Hugh wondered what she was up to now, and why, and hoped it might be, though it seldom was, a flash in the pan.

Two hours later he found himself with his wife and Arnold Cottle, standing on the wet grass and examining the inscription on the Rupert Moore seat. It wasn’t yet dark and wouldn’t be for an hour. The sky was heavily overcast and the sea the colour of a recently scoured aluminium pot. No one would have supposed, thought Hugh, that somewhere up there in the west was the sun which, contrary to all present evidence, science told him was throwing off light at the rate of two hundred and fifty million tons a minute.

The others were too rapt to be distracted. He had a look at Fisher (‘In memory of Colonel Marius Fisher, VC, DSO, 1874–1951’) and at Teague (‘William James Teague, of this Town, lost at the Battle of Jutland’) and then he prodded Rupert Moore and announced, for something to say, ‘That’s oak.’

‘It is indeed, my dear old chap.’ Arnold Cottle spoke to Hugh very warmly and kindly, as if he had decided a priori that he was a harmless lunatic. ‘You could get oak in those days. This one was made by a chap called Sarafin, Arthur Sarafin. Curious name, eh? Corruption of Seraphim, I daresay. Fine craftsman, lived up the coast at Lowestoft, but he died quite young, more’s the pity. My father knew him, had some of the furniture he made. You can see his initials up there where the crossbar at the top joins the post. AS in a little circle, see?’