What survives is what we are able to make of it, and I should admit that the account of the early years of my involvement with the Brigshaw family is my own disputable version of those events – a stab at autobiographical fiction written long before my errand to Umbria. Even as I was writing it I understood well enough why that account dried up where it did, and why Hal had played only a shadowy role in its pages. But it’s time to bring him out of the shadows now. Hal Brigshaw then – six foot four inches tall, a big man with big ideas, and a habit, when under pressure, or when trying to articulate some difficult thought, of interlacing the fingers of his hands, raising them at full stretch above his head, and then lowering them slowly to his crown, as though compressing all the available oxygen inside his brain. I was watching him do that on the night when he took me to see the belly dancers in the nightclub in Port Rokesby. I should have realized that the gesture betrayed more anxiety than his words disclosed.
