On the last day of the conference, he excused himself from the celebratory dinner; he said he felt a touch of flu coming on.

‘I will get a doctor,’ said the Reverend Jeffcoat, who was in charge of the Celebratory Dinner Committee.

‘That’s not necessary,’ Jonathan said.

‘But my dear fellow, you are plainly—’

Jonathan struggled to control his irritation – and failed. ‘Leave me alone,’ he said and turned his back on his tormentor, who watched him walk away, admiring his fortitude if not his manners.

At the hotel, my grandfather told the clerk he was not to be disturbed. Half an hour later, he put on his frock coat. This frock coat may have been twenty years out-of-date by this time, and in its way an absurdity, but then so is any cockade. How foolish they all look when looked at cold: epaulets, rows of decorations, army helmets, panaches – and yet how glorious, too. A man in a frock coat hasn’t failed. Of course he hasn’t. Who could possibly suggest it? Jonathan my grandfather walked quietly down the back stairs, cranked up his ancient black Saxon and rattled down the roads toward George’s mansion.

On our modern-day trip to Hannaville, in Atlas’s squashy bathtub of a car, Claire drove for the first hour or so. Atlas was proud of her driving. ‘She’s as good as any man,’ he’d said. ‘She nips in and out of traffic just like me.’ Despite her fluffy white curls and pink pants suit, there was no timidity, no indecision; she was fast, firm, controlled. The road she drove us along, out of Dr Youngblood’s old age ghetto and up the Washington coast, was one of those roads that look as though they could be anywhere in the United States, east coast just as well as west, north, south, middle west, anywhere at all: a smooth, meaningless highway from nowhere to nowhere, heavy traffic in both directions. But it was a pretty day, clear and cool, not at all like the awful midwestern summer night Jonathan describes in his diaries: ‘hot enough to drown in,’ he says, the very same words he used to describe that terrible night half a century before when George had come calling at the soddy door.

Jonathan parked the Saxon a mile from George’s mansion. He walked the rest of the way. Not until he reached the outskirts of George’s land did he sense the full power of the ordered ranks around him: old hatreds and animosities in battle formation, indestructible as only blind instincts can be. He listened to the dark night as he crossed the lawn and heard echoes from the picnic of two weeks before: George’s voice mid-stride in a platitude, the giggled whispers of children, the rustling skirts of George’s pretty daughter, his own footsteps on the grass as he walked toward the big house.

2

‘Here on this spot, in this very hour,’ writes Clausewitz on the eve of battle, ‘to conquer the enemy is the purpose in which the plan of the War with all its threads converges, in which all distant hopes, all dim glimmerings of the future meet.’ Jonathan’s strategy followed the age-old principle: seek the simplest solution. His tactics were complex but clean-lined, classical; he managed things so that he saw George before George saw him. ‘Good evening, Senator,’ he said. His voice was mild.