Familiar Rooms in Darkness by Caro Fraser

shrugged. ‘It was their affair. Maybe Cecile thought if anyone found out they were adopted, but on the sly, they’d be taken away from her. I don’t know. So she told you she’d had a difficult birth, did she?’ Meacher snickered. He picked up his spoon and dug into his treacle tart. ‘Thirty years on, and still keeping up appearances. Only nowadays they call it being in denial, don’t they?’
    Adam sat thinking, taking apart, then putting together again, the pieces of this story. Meacher sat hunched over his pudding, eating with slow relish. When he had finished, he picked up the empty cigarette packet from the table and flipped the top open forlornly. Adam gestured to the waiter and said, ‘Twenty Marlboro. Put them on the bill.’
    The cigarettes came. Adam watched as Meacher unwrappedthe fresh packet and lit one. He thought about what Giles Hamblin had said of Meacher.
    Meacher winked at Adam through the smoke. ‘I fancy a brandy to round off the meal.’
    Adam asked the waiter for the wine list. Meacher perused it thoughtfully, then ordered a triple Armagnac.
    â€˜Anyway,’ he said to Adam, ‘that’s a nice little story for your book.’
    â€˜If it’s true.’
    Meacher didn’t look in the least offended. ‘Oh, it is. Take my word.’
    â€˜What about Gerald the GP? Is he still around?’
    â€˜No. Long dead.’
    â€˜If it’s true that the children were adopted,’ said Adam slowly, ‘you would expect Harry and Cecile to have told them at some point. You would tell children that they were adopted, wouldn’t you?’
    â€˜Would you? I don’t know.’
    â€˜His daughter has never mentioned anything about it. Harry’s obituary simply referred to his children, nothing about adopted children.’
    George Meacher shrugged. ‘Sometimes you start off lying – and I suppose silence can be as good as a lie – and you get to a point where it’s more of a problem to tell the truth than carry on lying. You do what’s best.’
    The waiter brought the bill. Adam stared at the total. Either this was an enormous amount of money to be conned out of for nothing, or it was worth every penny. He had no way of knowing. He handed over his credit card.
    â€˜The thing is, I can’t put something like that in a bookwithout verification. Forgive me – but you could be making it all up.’
    â€˜True.’ Meacher tapped the ash from his cigarette, nodding.
    â€˜I can’t ask his children. I mean, it’s not something you–’ He stopped, sighed. ‘Anyway, if it is true, I don’t think they know, somehow.’
    â€˜Mmm. That’s a bit of a problem.’ Meacher grinned.
    Adam signed his credit-card slip and put away his wallet, tape recorder, pen and notebook. ‘Thank you for your time and trouble.’
    â€˜Always a pleasure.’
    Adam looked across at the happy, well-fed Meacher, bathed in a haze of cigarette smoke, his triple Armagnac still before him. Then he got up and left.
    Meacher crushed out his cigarette and went to the gents’ for a long and gratifying piss. Then he returned to the table, picked up his cigarettes and his brandy, and went downstairs to the bar. He perched again on the bar stool where he had been sitting when Adam first came in.
    â€˜Who was your friend, then, George?’ asked the barman, wiping glasses. ‘Not often someone buys you lunch upstairs.’
    â€˜Some journalist,’ replied Meacher. He lit another from the new pack of Marlboros. Talking about Harry and their times together in Soho all those years back – it had been strange. He never much thought about life then, when he had been young. Suddenly it seemed as clear as yesterday. All the chaotic times fused into a single image – himself, coming down Old Compton Street in thebright, clear late morning, head a bit thick but going to be all