5
  
  Two days after the predawn call from Judith-days in which the water heater in the 
studio had failed, leaving Gentle the option of bathing in polar waters or not at all (he 
chose the latter)-Klein summoned him to the house. He had good news. He'd heard of a 
buyer with a hunger that was not being satisfied through conventional markets, and Klein 
had allowed it to be known that he might be able to lay his hands on something 
attractive. Gentle had successfully re-created one Gauguin previously, a small picture 
which had gone onto the open market and been consumed without any questions being asked. 
Could he do it again? Gentle replied that he would make a Gauguin so fine the artist 
himself would have wept to see it. Klein advanced Gentle five hundred pounds to pay the 
rent on the studio and left him to it, remarking only that Gentle was looking a good deal 
better than he'd looked previously, though he smelled a good deal worse.
  Gentle didn't much care. Not bathing for two days was no great inconvenience when he 
only had himself for company; not shaving suited him fine when there was no woman to 
complain of beard burns. And he'd rediscovered the old private erotics: spit, palm, and 
fantasy. It sufficed. A man might get used to living this way; might get to like his gut 
a little ample, his armpits sweaty, his balls the same. It wasn't until the weekend that 
he started to pine for some entertainment other than the sight of himself in the bathroom 
mirror. There hadn't been a Friday or Saturday in the last year which hadn't been 
occupied by some social gathering, where he'd mingled with Vanessa's friends. Their 
numbers were still listed in his address book, just a phone call away, but he felt 
squeamish about making contact. However much he may have charmed them, they were her 
friends, not his, and they'd have inevitably sided with her in this fiasco.
  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-"
  "I didn't come here to hear this," Gentle said.
  "No, I realize that. It's just necessary for me to express how very precious she was to 
me. I count the years 1 had with her as the best of my life. But of course the best can't 
go on forever, can they, or how are they the best?" He drank again. "You know, she never 
talked about you," he said. "I tried to provoke her into doing so, but she said she'd put 
you out of her mind completely-she'd forgotten you, she said-which is nonsense, of 
course."
  "I believe it."
  "Don't," Estabrook said quickly. "You were her guilty secret."
  "Why are you trying to flatter me?"
  "It's the truth. She still loved you, all through the time she was with me. That's why 
we're talking now. Because I know it, and I think you do too."
  Not once so far had they mentioned her by name, almost as though from some