On his fifteenth birthday he had come to conclusions about three matters which from childhood had increasingly exercised his thoughts. He decided that God didn’t exist, that he didn’t love his parents and that he would become a surgeon. The first required no action on his part, merely the acceptance that since neither help nor comfort could be expected from a supernatural being, his life was subject, like any other, to time and chance and that it was up to him to take such control as he could. The second required little more of him. And when, with some embarrassment—and on his mother’s part some shame—they broke the news to him that they were thinking of divorce, he expressed regret—that seemed only proper—while subtly encouraging them to end a marriage that was obviously producing unhappiness for all three of them. The school holidays would be a great deal more pleasant if not disrupted by sullen silences or rancorous outbursts. When they were killed in a road accident while on a holiday planned in the hope of a reconciling fresh start—there had been several such—he was visited for a moment by a fear that there might be a power as strong as the one he had rejected, but more ruthless and possessed of a certain sardonic humour, before telling himself that it was folly to abandon a benign superstition in favour of one less accommodating, possibly even malign. His third conclusion remained as an ambition: he would rely on the ascertainable facts of science and concentrate on becoming a surgeon.

His parents had left him little but their debts. That hardly mattered. He had always spent most of his summer holidays with his widowed grandfather in Bournemouth, and now this became his home. As far as he was capable of strong human affection, it was Herbert Chandler-Powell that he loved. He would have been fond of him even had the old man been poor, but was glad that he was rich. He had made a fortune by a talent for designing elegant and original cardboard boxes. It became prestigious for a company to deliver its goods in a Chandler-Powell container, for presents to be wrapped in a box with the distinctive C-P colophon. Herbert discovered and promoted new young designers and some of the boxes, issued in limited numbers, became collectors’ items. His firm needed no advertisement beyond the goods they produced. When he was sixty-five and George was ten, he sold the business to his largest competitor and retired with his millions. It was he who paid for George’s expensive education, saw him through Oxford, required nothing in return but his grandson’s company in the holidays from school and university, and later for three or four visits a year. For George these requirements had never been an imposition. When they walked or drove together, he would listen to his grandfather’s voice reciting stories of his depressed childhood, commercial triumphs, the Oxford years. Before George himself went up to Oxford his grandfather had been more specific. Now that remembered voice, strong and authoritative, broke through the high trembling beauty of the violins.