As for his own peers—the friends he’d had before Vanessa—most had faded. They were a part of his past and, like so many other memories, slippery. While people like Klein recalled events thirty years old in crystalline detail, Gentle had difficulty remembering where he was and with whom even ten years before. Earlier than that still, and his memory banks were empty. It was as though his mind was disposed only to preserve enough details of his history to make the present plausible. The rest it disregarded. He kept this strange fallibility from almost everybody he knew, concocting details if pressed hard. It didn’t much bother him. Not knowing what it meant to have a past, he didn’t miss it. And he construed from exchanges with others that though they might talk confidentially about their childhood and adolescence, much of it was rumor and conjecture, some of it pure fabrication.
Nor was he alone in his ignorance. Judith had once confided that she too had an uncertain grasp of the past, though she’d been drunk at the time and had denied it vehemently when he’d raised the subject again. So, between friends lost and friends forgotten, he was very much alone this Saturday night, and he picked up the phone when it rang with some gratitude.
“Furie here,” he said. He felt like a Furie tonight. The line was live, but there was no answer. “Who’s there?” he said. Still, silence. Irritated, he put down the receiver. Seconds later, the phone rang again. “Who the hell is this?” he demanded, and this time an impeccably spoken man replied, albeit with another question.
“Am I speaking to John Zacharias?”
Gentle didn’t hear himself called that too often. “Who is this?” he said again.
“We’ve only met once. You probably don’t remember me. Charles Estabrook?”
Some people lingered longer in the memory than others. Estabrook was one. The man who’d caught Jude when she’d dropped from the high wire. A classic inbred Englishman, member of the minor aristocracy, pompous, condescending and—
“I’d like very much to meet with you, if that’s possible.”
“1 don’t think we’ve got anything to say to each other.”
“It’s about Judith, Mr. Zacharias. A matter I’m obliged to keep in the strictest confidence but is, I cannot stress too strongly, of the profoundest importance,”
The tortured syntax made Gentle blunt. “Spit it out, then,” he said.
“Not on the telephone. I realize this request comes without warning, but I beg you to consider it.”
“I have. And no. I’m not interested in meeting you.”
“Even to gloat?”
“Over what?”
“Over the fact that I’ve lost her,” Estabrook said. “She left me, Mr. Zacharias, just as she left you. Thirty-three days ago.” The precision of that spoke volumes. Was he counting the hours as well as the days? Perhaps the minutes too? “You needn’t come to the house if you don’t wish to. In fact, to be honest, I’d be happier if you didn’t.”
He was speaking as if Gentle would agree to the rendezvous, which, though he hadn’t said so yet, he would.
It was cruel, of course, to bring someone of Estabrook’s age out on a cold day and make him climb a hill, but Gentle knew from experience you took whatever satisfactions you could along the way. And Parliament Hill had a fine view of London, even on a day of lowering cloud. The wind was brisk, and as usual on a Sunday the hill had a host of kite flyers on its back, their toys like multicolored candies suspended in the wintry sky. The hike made Estabrook breathless, but he seemed glad that Gentle had picked the spot.
“I haven’t been up here in years. My first wife used to like coming here to see the kites.”
He brought a brandy flask from his pocket, proffering it first to Gentle. Gentle declined.
“The cold never leaves one’s marrow these days. One of the penalties of age. I’ve yet to discover the advantages. How old are you?”
Rather than confess to not knowing, Gentle said, “Almost forty.”
“You look younger. In fact, you’ve scarcely changed since we first met. Do you remember? At the auction? You were with her. I wasn’t. That was the world of difference between us. With; without. I envied you that day the way I’d never envied any other man, just for having her beside you. Later, of course, I saw the same look on other men’s faces—”