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By Root 2578 0

resort known for pride in its musical activities. Sooner or later to be a conductor in the provinces was a destiny Moreland had often predicted for himself in moods of despondency. I knew little or nothing about his life there, nor how his marriage was going. The postcards dealt usually with some esoteric matter that had caught his attention – a peculiar bathing dress on the beach, peepshows on the pier, the performance of pierrots – rather than the material of daily life. In the earlier stages of marriage, Matilda was keeping pace pretty well with circumstances not always easy from shortage of money. When he caught sight of me, Moreland looked quite cross, as if I had surprised him in some situation of which he was almost ashamed.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ he asked brusquely.

‘Visiting my wife.’

‘Like me.’

‘Is Matilda in this awful place too?’

‘But of course.’

He, too, had seemed in the depths of gloom when I first saw him; now, delighted at encountering a friend in these unpromising surroundings, he began to laugh and slap a rolled-up newspaper against his leg. Matilda had made him buy a new suit, in general cleaned up his appearance.

‘So you have come back to London.’

‘Inevitably.’

‘For good?’

‘I had to. I couldn’t stand the seaside any longer. Matilda is about to have a baby, as a matter of fact. That is why I am haunting these portals.’

‘Isobel has just had a miscarriage.’

‘Oh, Lord,’ said Moreland, ‘I am always hearing about miscarriages. I used to think such things were quite out of date, and took place only in Victorian times when ladies – as Sir Magnus Donners would say – laced themselves up “a teeny, teeny little bit too tight”. Rather one of Sir Magnus’s subjects. I may add I shall be quite bankrupt unless Matilda makes up her mind fairly soon. She keeps on having false alarms. It is costing a fortune.’

He began to look desperately worried. The man with the black bag took a step forward.

‘Both you gentlemen might be surprised if I told you incidence of abortion,’ he said in a thin rasping voice, ‘recently quoted in medical journals.’

‘Oh, sorry,’ said Moreland. ‘This is Dr Brandreth.’

I saw the man to be the Brandreth who had been at school with me. Four or five years older, he had probably been unaware of my existence at that time, but I had seen him again at least once in later life, notably at that Old Boy Dinner at which our former housemaster, Le Bas, had fainted, an occasion when Brandreth, as a doctor, had taken charge of the situation. Tall and bony, with hair like the locks of a youngish actor who has dusted over his skull to play a more aged part in the last act, Brandreth possessed those desiccated good looks which also suggest the theatre. I began to explain that I knew him already, that we had been schoolboys together, but he brushed the words aside with a severe ‘Yes, yes, yes …’ at the same time taking my hand in a firm, smooth, interrogatory, medical grip, no doubt intended to give confidence to a patient, but in fact striking at once a disturbing interior dread at the possibilities of swift and devastating diagnosis.

‘Another of my woman patients,’ he went on, ‘happens to be in here. Rather a difficult case for the gynaecologist. I’ve been giving him a hand with the after-treatment – from the temperamental point of view.’

Brandreth continued to hold Moreland with his eye, as if to make sure his attention did not wander too far afield. At the same time he took up a position closer to myself that seemed to imply appeal to me, as one probably familiar with Moreland’s straying mind, to help if necessary in preventing his escape before the time was ripe. Penning us both in, Brandreth was evidently determined to obstruct with all the forces at his command further conversation between us which, by its personal nature, might exclude himself. However, at the critical moment, just as Brandreth was beginning to speak, he was interrupted by the competition of a new, impelling force. A stoutly built man, wearing a Jaeger dressing-gown, pushed past us without ceremony, making towards