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provincial town a few miles east of Newstead Abbey, the Byron family estate; but Newstead’s in bad shape, the Byrons have no money, and the young lord has been forced to rent out the only habitable part of the Abbey to another nobleman, Lord Grey. All of this I remembered more or less from my Masters in English lit. It was hard to see any personal angle, anything that reflected Peter’s own life. But by the end I wasn’t so sure, and I sat in the quiet kitchen staring at the last couple pages for several minutes – until I heard the front door opening, at which point for no good reason I quickly put them away.
    Early the next morning I caught the all-day flight to London out of Newark. I sleep very badly on planes. In response to this problem I try to reduce all activity, mental and physical, to a minimum: drinking water, staring at the seat in front. I lie dormant, as if eight hours occupied by the upright tray-table will pass more quickly than the same stretch of time taken up with random impressions. It doesn’t, of course, and besides, I don’t have such strict control over my mind. Even when my eyes were closed, I thought about Peter. On our lunchtime expeditions, our escapes from the school grounds, he used to walk holding his hands behind his back. Probably he thought me not much older than one of his students. When I spoke, sometimes he stepped towards me, leaning in to listen. He also seemed very pleased to be talking himself. Once he confessed, quite seriously, that he’d never read Tom Jones . This is what passed for intimacy between us. Was there really anything I could learn about him from what he had written? All the way to Heathrow, I drifted in and out of this question, and got nowhere.

Fair Seed-Time
    It seems to me very cruel that a boy should be sent away to school for much of the year, where he is regularly abused and made to feel painfully any inferiority of station or person, and then, when he is sent from , school between terms, should be shut out from his ancestral home. For ten years I was kept out of Newstead by an accident of birth – and death. My cousin had not died, and my great-uncle had outlived him. But now they are both dead. Mr Hanson, who advises me on these matters, has explained that the estate is entangled, and I have seen for myself that it is in ruins. You must be patient, he says. God help me, but I am not.
    My mother tells me I have a home, that it is called Southwell. I have been here a week and we are both heartily sick of each other. Yesterday we had a small party to welcome our tenant at Newstead, Lord Grey de Ruthyn. My mother invited the Reverend Becher, and Mrs Pigot, and her daughter Elizabeth – who, with her brother John, make up the only tolerable society in Southwell. Most of the afternoon, I refused to give up my room and was only persuaded to come out when I overheard Lord Grey offering ‘to the young Lord the use of his Park, for shooting in’.
    â€˜If it is shooting you have come to talk about,’ I told him, when he repeated the suggestion, ‘you will find the society here very agreeable, for no one talks of anything else.’
    But I thanked him for his kindness. He is a fair, lively, acceptable -looking young man, who will if he wishes it turn a great many provincial hearts. About the average height and dressed very properly according to the fashion. My mother says to him, with her hand on my hair, ‘I was scarcely eighteen at his birth,’ which is a lie – she is out six years.
    â€˜Well,’ he said to me, on his departure, ‘I am not one of those men whom it pleases to promise hospitality for its own sake. I shall spend the summer in Caernarvonshire, in the mountains with my cousins. You are welcome to all that’s mine, my bed and table, etc.; after all, they are yours. I have them only on lease.’
    When he was gone, Elizabeth declared, ‘He looks as if he means to marry one