It was six-forty on the same Tuesday before George Chandler-Powell had finished his list of private patients at St. Angela’s Hospital. Pulling off his operating gown, he felt paradoxically both exhausted and restless. He had started early and worked without a break, which was unusual but necessary if he was to get through his London list of private patients before leaving for his customary Christmas holiday in New York. Since his early childhood, Christmas had become a horror to him, and he never spent it in England. His ex-wife, now married to an American financier well able to maintain her in the state both she and he regarded as reasonable for a very beautiful woman, held strong views about the necessity of all divorces being what she described as “civilised.” Chandler-Powell suspected that the word applied solely to the generosity or otherwise of the financial settlement, but with the U.S.A. fortune secured, she had been able to substitute the public appearance of generosity for the more mundane satisfaction of monetary gain. They liked seeing each other once a year, and he enjoyed New York and the programme of civilised entertainment Selina and her husband organised for him. He never stayed longer than a week before flying to Rome, where he stayed in the same pensione outside the city he had first visited when at Oxford, was quietly welcomed and saw no one. But the annual visit to New York had become a habit, and one which at present he saw no reason to break.

He was not due to arrive at the Manor until Wednesday night for the first operating session on Thursday morning, but two NHS wards had that morning been closed because of infection, and the next day’s list had had to be postponed. Now, back in his Barbican flat and looking out at the lights of the City, he felt the wait was interminable. He needed to get out of London, to sit in the great hall at the Manor before a wood fire, to walk in the lime avenue, to breathe a less cluttered air, with the taste of wood smoke, earth and mulched leaves on the unencumbered breeze. He flung what he needed for the next few days into a grip with the careless exhilaration of a schoolboy released for the holidays and, too impatient to wait for the lift, ran down the stairs to the garage and his waiting Mercedes. There was the usual problem getting free of the City but once he was on the motorway the pleasure and relief of movement took over, as it invariably did when he drove alone at night, and disconnected thoughts of the past, like a series of brown and fading photographs, came untroubling to mind. He slotted a CD of Bach’s Violin Concerto in D minor into the player and, with his hands lightly on the wheel, let the music and the memories merge in a contemplative calm.