He loved newspapers, and everything that went with them. After four years on the Star-Telegram, and two on a local daily in Illinois, he still had, at the age of twenty-four, the dew of Illinois on his desires. They were, simply stated, to be a good newspaperman. Since he had patience, energy, and enthusiasm, all in ample supply, and he could write as well, he was likely to succeed. But no one had told him this, so far. Least of all Ryan, the news editor, who now – and Grant jumped to his feet – was free.

Grant was one of the few people on the Star-Telegram who knocked on any door; when he did so, Ryan shouted: “Come in, for Christ’s sake!” as if he had already had his fill of callers on that particular morning. Grant, entering, looked down at him in affection and awe – a stocky, grey-haired man with a tough, square face, sitting solid and compact behind his desk as if it were his favourite, long-held bastion: the man who had grudgingly given Grant this wonderful job, four years before. At the moment, Ryan was shovelling papers – any papers he could find – off his desk into the ring of wire baskets that surrounded him: doubtless, thought Grant, he knew what he was doing, but it was not an orderly process, not the kind of thing you read about in the correspondence courses on making good in journalism … Then Ryan looked at him, glaring upwards under formidable eyebrows, and said: “Harry Grant … What have you lost?”

“Nothing.” Most people on the paper called Ryan ‘George’: a few called him ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr Ryan’: Grant, uneasily poised between these opposing compass-points, had survived four years without calling him anything at all. “I’ve done the piece on Esther Costello,” he went on, tendering the typescript he had been nursing for the past hour. “You remember – I asked if I could write it.”

“M’m …” Ryan took the proffered sheets with a non-committal grunt, and then his eyebrows shot up as he weighed them in his hand. Theatrically amazed, he leafed through them. “I wanted a story, not a goddamn novel.” Ryan put into the word ‘novel’ all the venom of the man who, however much he cherished the secret urge, would never get around to writing one. “How long is this epic?”

“About two thousand.”

“Two thousand? And all art, I suppose?” Ryan made a gesture – not an encouraging gesture – of finality. “Try it on Features,” he said, in the voice of a man saying: Give it to the first stray dog you meet.

“But it’s news,” said Grant, who was learning, though slowly, how to get fifty per cent of his own way on the Star-Telegram. “It really is the hell of a story … Don’t you remember how she came here to be cured, and it didn’t work out, and now she gets along fine, all because of this Bannister woman?”