Three Brothers by Peter Ackroyd Page B

said. Then he burst into tears.
    Daniel put his arm around him. “It will be all right,” he said.
    “No. It won’t be all right. It will never be right again.”
    “You’re taking it too seriously.”
    “And you’re not?”
    There was an immediate change in their relationship. They were no longer intimate. In fact they tried to avoid oneanother as much as possible. Daniel had performed so well that he was offered a research fellowship by the college, a post that he accepted with enthusiasm. This was the place in which he now wished to settle and to prosper. Stanley Askisson drifted to London where, after taking a civil-service examination, he found himself a junior clerk in the Ministry of Housing. Soon enough he was working directly for Cormac Webb. Daniel Hanway, meanwhile, had begun work on his dissertation on “The Criminal Element in Eighteenth Century Literature.” He continued to see Sparkler in London.

VII
    Red red robin
    I T WAS raining, a mild and gentle rain that shrouded the city in a pearl-grey light. Sam was walking through what was for him still an unfamiliar part of London, south of the river. He sensed a difference of atmosphere; there was no urgency, no energy, in the air. The rain billowed around the houses like a bland mist. He pushed open a gate and walked up a small front path between patches of grass; he rang the bell, and the door opened a fraction before he was admitted.
    Fifteen minutes later he came out across the threshold. It was still raining. He was accompanied by a middle-aged woman, who stopped and put her hand up to a pocket in her jacket. “I almost forgot,” she said. “Take it.”
    “I don’t want this, you know.”
    “Still, I like to give it to you.”
    He took the envelope and, without looking back, went into the street. He did not look up until he passed St. George’s Church in Borough High Street. An old woman was sitting on its worn steps, her hair tied together with rags. Sam reached into the pocket of his jacket, and gave the envelope to her. He knew that it contained a five-pound note. He was given the same amount every week, and always handed the money to the first vagrant he saw. And who was the woman in the housefrom whom he had received the money? Sam had found his mother at last.
    Three months earlier he had entered the church of Our Lady of Sorrows in Camden, where he had first seen the statue of the Virgin. He had been hoping, ever since, that the chapel and the statue would somehow reappear and that the nuns would also return. What had come and gone might come again.
    He sat at the back of the church, his hands clasped in front of him; he repeated some words that the nuns had recited to him. “ Ave maris stella, virgo et puella .” The door leading from the porch was suddenly opened, and there stepped a woman into the nave wearing a white raincoat and a blue scarf. She entered one of the pews, and Sam saw her for a moment in profile. Hurriedly he left the church and stood on the gravel path outside the porch. What should he do? Should he talk to her? Would she recognise him? He feared another rejection—that was how he put it to himself—and so he decided to wait in the street where she would not notice him. A few minutes later she left the church and came out, taking off her scarf as she swung open the wooden gate in front of her. She turned left and walked quickly away. Sam decided to follow her, at a careful distance.
    She entered the underground station at the top of Camden High Street, and stood in line for a ticket. Sam hated this station. It had an acrid smell of old machinery, and the booming sound of trains echoed from the depths; the dank atmosphere was filled with foreboding. He did not appreciate the world under the ground. Yet he waited in the queue, unwilling to let his mother out of his sight, and then followed her down the escalator to the southward-bound platform of the Northern Line.
    He sat at the other end of the carriage, from