JULIAN

It had started, as these things did, without a decision.

I want to be precise about this because the precision matters, because the absence of a decision was itself a kind of information, the specific and telling information of a thing that happens when the part of you that makes decisions has been occupied elsewhere and the rest of you has quietly done what it was going to do anyway. I had been at the desk in the study at nine o'clock. At some point between nine and ten I had moved to the dining table. I had moved because the contract I was reviewing required the physical spread...