“That’s great.” She took a small appointment book from a drawer in the table in the hall and scanned through the empty pages. “Is next Thursday all right? Around 3:30?”

“That sounds . . . fine,” Desmond said. He’d been anticipating the standard business of introductions and facile compliments about the house, but these were clearly beside the point, as if, unbeknownst to him, he and Jane had been friends and business partners for years. And something in her blunt, amiable manner did make him feel he could dispense with all of his usual wariness and get right to the risky business of being friends with her. The phone rang again. Jane looked at it for a moment. “It’s probably just my brother calling with an idiotic excuse for being late. He’s supposedly coming to dinner, but his wife is twelve months pregnant, so you never know.”

She was several inches shorter than Desmond, but she had a way of holding her chin up and at a slight angle so that she appeared to be looking down at him, not with condescension, he decided, but as if she were lining up her defenses in case there was an attack at some later point in the evening. Several buttons of her blouse were undone, exposing a surprising amount of cleavage, making it obvious that she genuinely liked her ample body. Forty, Desmond guessed, and determined to be happy about it.

She nodded toward the back of the house, inviting him to follow her. “Don’t mind the mess,” she said. “Gerald is six. Although hopelessly tidy, come to think of it.” She had on a pair of white, low-heeled sandals that clacked against her soles as she walked. They didn’t exactly go with the rest of her outfit but drew attention to her slim, shapely legs. Beautiful ankles, Desmond thought, although that wasn’t the kind of thing he was used to noticing on anyone.

“So, briefly,” Desmond said, “what is your idea about the series?”

“I’ve been trying to put together a series of biographies for years now, but I never found a theme to make it all cohere. When I was reading the Westerly biography, it struck me that it was a mistake to focus on the greats in history when the mediocrities on the edges tell us so much more about the culture. I’m thinking in that direction. Westerly might be a good place to start, unless you’re working on someone even more marginal at the moment.” They were passing through a front parlor, a thin room filled, in a desultory way, with new sofas and chairs in light shades of brown. Neither pretty nor ugly, the furniture was so aggressively bland and self-effacing it was almost invisible. Desmond had the distinct impression no one ever used the room. “You are working on another biography, aren’t you?”

“I’m very close to finished,” Desmond said. “A singer named Pauline Anderton.”