Free A City of Strangers by Robert Barnard Page A

windows that gave nothing away. Adrian hoped he would get off before him, but he went on sitting there, puffing and scratching himself. Only when the bus was approaching Adrian’s stop, the library stop, did Phelan heave himself up and start down the stairs. Adrian held back and let him get off. Once out into Head Street he looked curiously to see where Phelan was going. Not to the library, that was for sure. He was walking heavily ahead to the lights and making as if to cross the road. Adrian looked at his watch, saw he had five minutes to spare, and threaded his way across the traffic ahead of the lights.
    The handsome, filthy city of Sleate had its usual morning bustle, and Phelan looked incongruous among all the business people. Adrian saw him begin down North Parade. What business could he have there? A fine arts auctioneer, a solicitor or two, an estate agent. Hope lifted Adrian’s heart momentarily: Perhaps he was looking at other houses? He followed him down North Parade, and groaned when he walked past the estate agent. He stopped to look in a window. Adrian did not stop soon enough and was afraid his reflection had been seen. But Phelan turned and went on. He was looking at numbers. Ah, now he was going up steps and through an ornate Victorian doorway. Adrian dallied. He did not wish to be caught by Phelan if he came straight out again. Then he walked briskly past, flicking an eye momentarily up to take in the plate on the wall: Simon Carbury, Solicitor.
    Jack Phelan was going to arrange the purchase of The Hollies.

    Steven Copperwhite finished his double lecture on Yeats at eleven o’clock. Tricky poet Yeats, he felt: elusive. He wasn’t meeting Margaret till half past twelve, but he felt unsettled. Perhaps it was Yeats, perhaps it was Margaret. He dumped his books in his office and dawdled down into town.
    He loafed around the W. H. Smith and Austell’s bookshops for a bit, looking on the shelves for anything relevant to his old-age topic. What a lot of fiction was published in paperback these days! Perhaps television was not destroying the reading habit after all. Perhaps people did both at the same time. Outside in the street he gave a coin to a musician playing Bach. He was always sorry for street musicians in Sleate, trying to wrest money out of Yorkshiremen. Remembering how he and Margaret had often sat companionably reading and listening to music, he drifted up to the Classical Record Shop. He riffled through the box of new LPs and wondered what she would like. The Dvořák Violin Concerto? It would make a change from the Cello. The Tchaikovsky Number Two?
    Suddenly he remembered that when they had split up he had taken the stereo and the record collection. In fact, he remembered reading somewhere that when marriages break up it is almost always the husband who takes the stereo and records. How odd. Why? In fact, he hardly ever played anything these days.
    He drifted down to the Art Gallery. Only just twelve, but perhaps Margaret would get there early. He dallied by the postcard stall, where the attendants, as usual, were struggling to be civil to the public, and failing. He wandered upstairs to look at Kramer’s The Day of Atonement It had always been one of his and Margaret’s favorite pictures. Perhaps, he thought, with an uprush of sentimentality, she would have the same thought and come up and look at it. But though he dallied before it an unconscionable time, she did not show up.
    At twenty-five past he went down to the cafeteria and bagged a table. As he was about to sit down a thought struck him, and he looked guiltily round. The Gallery Cafeteria was not one of Evie’s haunts—too far from the University at lunchtime—but it could easily be the haunt of some of her circle. It catered to vegetarians and health faddists (as he tried not to think of them). But no, there wasn’t anybody he recognized, and he relaxed. At twelve-thirty precisely Margaret