I hoped you would ask.’ The chestnut roast was the doctor’s own recipe of sweet winter vegetables from the combe’s garden and chestnuts gathered from the meadow and stored on racks in the cavernous larder. We drank wine from squat little tumblers instead of the tall, ringing glasses we had used before, and the doctor had abandoned his tweeds and tie in favour of a thick Aran jumper — he looked quite different. ‘Hartley had been discussing the subject of religious doubt with the earnest young Earl of Fakenham,’ he said, ‘and asserted that such doubts were characteristic of every thinking man, themselves included. To the earl’s vehement protests he replied, “Does not the sun have phases, just like the moon? And yet they are hard to see because of that body’s greater brilliance. So it is with your doubts, perhaps.” When the bemused earl summoned his friends to hear this absurd analogy, Hartley stuck to his story and said he would prove it the next morning if the noble lord would kindly meet him in the quad with a piece of smoked glass.
