I had seen him on television, of course—it was increasingly hard to miss him—but the last time I had met him in person was when we picked up our degrees. Mary had been there too. “Well,” he’d said, punching me gently on the arm. “Thank God it’s over. Let’s find a drink. We need to celebrate.” “No,” I’d said. “I don’t want to.” Mary hadn’t said anything at all. I don’t deny that it was a shock to see Adam after all this time, and it wasn’t a pleasant one. It was the first of the three shocks that happened in swift succession that afternoon. I was standing at one of the tall windows of the reading room overlooking St. James’s Square. It was a Tuesday afternoon in February, just after lunch, and it was raining. I was watching the domes of umbrellas scurrying like wet beetles on the pavements and the steady clockwise flow of traffic round the square. Adam must have walked across the garden in the middle. He came out of the gate in the railings on the north side.
